While I was working at openDemocracy and developing the new version of the site, we took the decision to move all images to our pro "flickr":http://www.flickr.com/ account. We used the automated thumbnail system to display the image on the homepage and then to display the bigger image in the actual article. Together with caching this process worked very well and saved on bandwidth and hard drive space. We did not have to thumbnail the images manually, we did not have to upload the images while publishing articles. All we needed was the flickr image ID and the system would automatically look up the image. All the image managment and orginisation was managed by flickr's excellent interface. While developing this current blog engine I am thinking that I will use a similar technique to manage external assets. If this is done the blog interface can be quite minimal. After all I am trying to go for a no thrills simple blog engine. "Mephisto":http://www.mephistoblog.com/ handled assets in a nice way. But what if they did not have to? I am sure the interface would be less cluttered. In my effort to make things minimal, I do not want to remove functionality which people have come to expect from any blogging platform. Pushing things to external services seems like a good option to me. I am also looking into using an external service for managing comments and discussions. That will allow me to remove all of the comment functionality from my code. I am going to try and take this as far as I can, just because I want to see where it gets and what kind of minimal but functional interface can be built. Any thoughts? 3 72 2009-04-04T00:00:00Z 29 true local-assets-dead-simple-blog

!http://hamza.khan-cheema.com/images/flickr_logo.jpg! I am still in the process of making my simple blog engine opensource. I just need to sort out some fundamental issues. One of these issues is how to address the storage of external assets, mainly images.

2009-04-04T22:07:03Z 1