Introducing Colugo, a self-hosted image
service for Tweetie

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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