While I thoroughly admire services like TwitPic and GDZLLA, I’m kind of an independent guy when it comes to my data. I like the feeling I get knowing that if a service disappears one day, my stuff won’t vanish along with it. You can only have that kind of peace of mind if you shed your dependence on external services.1 I use Shaun Inman’s Lessn URL shortener for that very reason, after seeing what almost happened with tr.im.
When I went looking for a solution to self-host my Tweetie images I was surprised to find so few options out there. I mean, I couldn’t be the only one wanting to do this, right? Figuring I should probably take a night off from playing Dragon Age anyhow, I decided to start hacking at the Tweetie API and build my own solution. Colugo is what I came up with.
Colugo is nothing special, really. Just a simple PHP script that interprets the POST call from Tweetie and stores the image data for you. I added a few nice little bonus features, like writing tweet data and copyright info onto the image, and integration with Lessn to auto-shorten the tweeted URLs for you.
You can grab the latest version off GitHub. This is an incredibly early version of the software, and I would expect many of you to run into bugs, but I’m hoping you’ll report them, share bug fixes you come up with, and help build Colugo into something really special.
1 Yes, I recognize the irony of stating this and writing an app for a centralized service like Twitter.
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Great little thing you’ve got going here. Any chance you intend to extend it a little further for something like say generating lessn urls for images uploaded from a computer. Would love to ditch twitpic entirely and go self hosted.
Hi Colin; it would be easy enough to apply the functionality to local file uploads, sure. I’ve considered it previously but as I except Tweetie for Mac to support the same custom services functionality as it’s iPhone counter-part, I’ve been holding off on building that particular function. Still, since interest has been expressed, I’ll be happy to look into building it as time permits. Thanks!
Thanks a bunch! Will be dandy to have an easy way to share without losing control.
Great script. Just played around with it. One small thing I’m missing is the option to resize the uploaded images. In my case they don’t fit my site layout if I shot in landscape mode. I tried myself to code this in but somehow was not able to get this working as expected.