10 Years of Zoph: Indexation and the start of Zoph

Indexation

In 1999 I graduated from college and started looking for a job. I wasn't immediately successful and while I looked I wrote some scripts. I started with a contacts database written in Perl using CGI and a MySQL database. After that was working I moved on to something a little more useful. It was called Indexion and stored people, places and photos in the database. I didn't finish it but in some ways it was a distant ancestor of Zoph.

Thankfully I did manage to find a job and was saved from writing another iteration of those Perl scripts. In August I moved to San Jose to work at Knight Ridder New Media, the online division of the newspaper company that had moved its headquarters to the Silicon Valley the year before.

In early 2000 I was going on trip to England and Wales and was in the market for a digital camera. In February I ordered a Kodak DC 280 from Onvia and after the trip in April I had over 300 photos and wanted a way to organize them.

Zoph 0.1

I looked around but didn't see anything that really matched my needs. I was surprised how most open source photo albums stored fairly unstructured metadata. I wanted to separate people, places and photos, but most projects didn't seem to operate like that.

At KRNM I had been learning more about table design and I figured it wouldn't be hard to just write a normalized photo database myself if I couldn't find an existing one. And so I started on what would become Zoph.

PHP 3 had been getting popular and was easy to use so I went with that for the UI. Since I had many photos already I wanted an command line importer. I used Perl for that part, though it bugged me to be using two different languages. I don't think it occurred to me to try to get PHP running on the command line. MySQL and Apache rounded out the technologies.

By September of 2000 the first version of Zoph running on my desktop. Later, when there was going to be another version, I called this release 0.1 just because that was when I had first sent a link around to a few people. For example, here's a what I wrote my sister on September 26:

A couple of weeks ago, for a week straight, I worked on my photo album. It's sorta working but not everything is finished and I'm probably going to redo it sometime anyway. But you can take a look if you want.

Jason Geiger

As you can see, it was a major rollout with a big marketing push.

There's not much of a story behind the name. I decided to go with a recursive acronym and came up with "Organizes PHotos" part before picking a first letter. It hadn't occurred to me until I submitted Zoph to various sites much later that I'd picked a name that would almost always end up at the very end of the search results. I guess I could have gone with something more alphabetically potent like Boph or Coph, but I still like the sound and distinctiveness of Zoph.

Over the course of 2001 I worked on Zoph off and on but didn't share it further. Then in early 2002 I decided to leave my job and also decided to release Zoph to the public, knowing I would have more time to dedicate to it when I quit. But before releasing Zoph to the wild I thought I'd rewrite it, adding some features and cleaning up the code.