And how it made my life easier
Posted on May 20, 2012 by Jeffrey van Binsbergen
A few years ago I started an image hosting site. It is nothing special, just an image site like thousand others. It never became very popular and it didn’t even earn me any money. Still I am happy that I took the time to start this site, since it made my life and that of a few others easier.
So why I started an image hosting site when there are thousands of other sites available? In the past I used another image hosting site. The site was pretty good, they allowed hot linking and the latency wasn’t that bad. Until the day all images disappeared! The image host went down. Me and several others were using that site as primary image host and linked to them on forums. All those images were broken. I quickly came to the conclusion that this could happen with all the free sites. Within a day I threw some PHP code together (which I improved a year later) and placed it on a website. Finally, I could upload images again but this time without having to worry they will someday disappear for some strange reason. The site was fast and allowed hot linking. Within a few days it was pretty clear it was just what other people were also seeking so I made it public.
The website is called xkcd.nl, named after a very popular web comic on xkcd.com. The story about the name is simple: I love registering domain names. I have tons of ‘special’ domain names, like very short or popular ones. When I began the website I needed a short domain for it. This was the only short one I liked which I didn’t already used for something else. So I chose it. In the last few years I got tons of comments on the name. Most weren’t positive. People often suspected that the name was just to get more visitors. I just liked the short name.
Another great addition is the ‘XKCD.NL Screenshot share’ application. Most of the images I uploaded were screenshots. The steps to make, crop, save and then upload the screenshot took long, longer than I wanted. So I made a small C# application and a small API into my image hosting site, bound it to my print screen button and removed as many steps possible. Now it is just pressing the button and selecting the area on my screen I want to share, great! Some fellow people using xkcd.nl are also very happy with it.
Now a few years later, I’m still using it almost every day. Of course there are small bugs to fix and features I could add. But I’m happy with it. So are others. There are a few gigabytes of images uploaded and every few seconds an image is requested by someone linked from another site. They don’t have to worry about “broken” images since I never had to delete an image since the beginning.
Thanks for reading the post The story behind my image hosting site! Got questions or suggestions?
Link to this post: http://jeffreyvanbinsbergen.nl/1/The+story+behind+my+image+hosting+site
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