Just lately, when stuck for ideas, I’m finding that doodling gets me going again. Doodling is like blogging in that, at times, if you just damn start, then before you know it, you end up with something that has become something… like making something out of nothing.

I’ve just posted a few more random doodles to The Drawing Board of Tom Smith. I had been using Google’s Picasa to store images, partly because it has a nice uploading tool, but for some reason the images can’t be organised by “most recent”, which is a shame. Picasa is missing all sorts of things that Flickr has but I decided against using Flickr because of the paltry upload limit (for cheapskate free accounts at least).

So, I decided to spend an hour and create a django app that simply looks in an FTP folder and lists them by most recent. This means it can also have an RSS feed of latest images which is what I wanted anyway. And most importantly, I can point a URL for a picture that automatically gets updated when I add new drawings… like this…

… another thing Picasa didn’t offer. Sometimes simple is simpler. I’ve yet to add the code to thumbnail the images, but will real soon. A job for python’s wonderful PIL library.

The intention has always been to try and create “Twitter for images”… so that doodling can be as simple as, well, twittering. I thought Picasa would work but didn’t, a simple FTP folder is much better. Now, all I need to do is create an AppleScript that watches a folder (of drawings) and automatically FTP’s them onto the server. Shouldn’t be hard. It pains me that Alias Sketchbook Pro’s default file type is TIFF… anyway.

Next on my to-do list after the thumbnailing is…

• to make the RSS feed take a number_of_drawings paramater
• automatically upload any new pictures to CafePress. I would really like to have a mug with a drawing of a mug on it. I wonder if this is possible? By tea time?
• automatically add any copyright and/or a URL to an image. Another job for PIL I guess
• automatically upload to a business card site. My ambition would be to have one of my drawings as a business card and get Hugh to draw on the back of it.

It was nice to see Paul using a usability doodle on a usability post about wireframes (saving you money) whilst I was doodling about the frustration of the opposite, that feeling of wasting your time wireframing something that doesn’t need communicating because there is already a shared understanding about what it is.

Something from nothing.