So, folks keep bugging me, “Why’d you even bother building ‘exhi’? There’s like a million tools out there already, right?” Well, lemme tell ya, it wasn’t exactly planned like some grand project. It just kinda… happened.
The Start of it All
Honestly, I just wanted a dead simple way to show off some of my own stuff. You know, a few pictures, maybe some notes I’d jotted down. Nothing fancy. I figured, “Hey, a weekend, tops, and I’ll have a neat little personal gallery.” Yeah, right. Famous last words, those ones.
First off, I grabbed one of those static site generator things. Seemed easy enough. And for just plain text and basic images, it was okay, I guess. But then, the itch started. “Wouldn’t it be cool,” I thought, “if I could filter these things? Or add a new picture without having to rebuild the whole darn site every single time?” That’s where the “simple” part started to fly out the window.
Things Got Complicated
So, I started looking around. Maybe a bit of JavaScript? Found a lightweight framework, looked promising. Got that working, more or less. But then, if I wanted to add stuff easily, I mean really easily, without fiddling with code files, I needed some way to save new entries. Suddenly, I’m reading about databases. Databases! For my tiny little “exhi” project! Even if it was just gonna be something like SQLite, it felt like bringing a cannon to a knife fight. And then you need a way for the webpage to talk to this database thing. Ugh.
It wasn’t just about the tech, though. The real kicker, why I even went down this rabbit hole, it’s kinda funny. My old man, he’s got this massive collection of old stamps. Boxes and boxes of ’em. He kept saying he wanted to “put them on the computer” so he could show his buddies at the coffee shop without lugging albums around. He tried a few photo sites, but he’d call me up every five minutes, “Son, how do I do this? Where’s that button again?” It was driving me nuts.
So, I thought, “Alright, I’ll make something so simple, even Dad can use it.” That was the real mission for “exhi”. A way for him to upload a picture of a stamp, add a short note, and that’s it. No logins, no complicated menus, just… stamp, note, save. View.
The Grind and the Result
Man, the hours I sunk into that. Getting the image upload to work without it barfing all the time. Making sure the layout didn’t look like a Picasso painting after a bad night if you looked at it on a phone. I learned more about CSS tricks and weird server configurations than I ever wanted to know. There were nights I just wanted to throw the whole thing in the virtual trash can.
- Figuring out how to store the images and text simply.
- Making the upload process foolproof (or as close as I could get it).
- Making sure it looked halfway decent on different screens.
- Keeping it lightweight so it wouldn’t be slow as molasses.
So now, “exhi” is… well, it’s there. It works. Dad’s actually using it, slowly but surely. He shows his stamp buddies, and they nod, probably more impressed by the fact he’s using a tablet than by the stamps themselves. It’s not gonna win any awards. It’s clunky in places. But it does the one job it was built for.
Looking back, it’s wild. All that effort for this little thing. Could I have found something off the shelf? Maybe. Probably. But then I wouldn’t have this story, or the satisfaction of seeing Dad actually use something I built from scratch, even if he still calls me asking where the “any” key is. That, I guess, is “exhi” for ya.
