Note: This post is outdated, jumping back in time on the GitHub repo will get you the reference for what's mentioned in this post. The site is now implemented as a custom Go CMS, the code for which can be found in the same repo.
My last post explained about how I create backups of my Instagram posts. I had a few people ask about why this was useful. Other than the Instagram doomsday-scenario, in it's current form (a git repo with some images and JSON metadata) it wasn't.
I was ill over the Easter weekend and decided to make something with the data I'd extracted. Enter photos.charlieegan3.com.
The purposes of this new site are:
- Compliment rather than replace my public Instagram profile.
- Implement a number of features lacking or removed from Instagram.
- Offer a place to browse only photos, no ads, comments, popups etc.
Examples of some features:
- A map of all the places I've been - This was originally an Instagram feature but it was removed in 2016. The other nice thing about this is that I got Instagram before I first left the British Isles (we didn't go abroad when I was younger). This means that all the countries I've been to feature on the map.
- List of photos with a given tag - Many of my hashtags are just junk but there are some I use reliably such as #shotonmoment or #architecture. Instagram doesn't offer a way to view all your photos for a given tags.
- Nearby places - For a given 'place' (Facebook Graph Location), I've gotten my build scripts to do some Trigonometry and find other places nearby. So even if a place only has one photos, chances are the site will show some others nearby too.
- Full Calendar - I made use of this calendar implemented for Hugo. It means I can link to show all the photos on a given day, month, year, calendar month or even weekday.
- I also have a link to search for the original in my Dropbox/Google Photos accounts. This really is only useful to me as it requires a logged in session on those other sites!
All in, it's about 5k pages of html. Hugo can build this in about 16 seconds; Netlify can deploy it in about 6 mins. It's also auto-updated 4 times a day from a task running on Hyper.sh. With over 10,000 pages, felixonline is still the biggest static site I've made but if I post enough I might catch up in a decade or so!