I regard Pixita as my first “real” programming project, way back around 2006/07. I had been experimenting with Visual Basic since about 14 (although how much I understood what I was doing is questionnable) but trying to make sense of other languages made my head spin; It wasn’t until University started teaching me Java that suddenly everything clicked in to place, and now I can understand most any language thrown at me.
Anyway, Pixita was to be an image hosting service open to the public… If I remember rightly, Shane – my good friend and owner of one of my old forum hangouts Beta-Place (True-Betas and InfoByte later in it’s life) – had just moved us on to an “unlimited everything” server, and we basically wanted to test it out, as well as the obvious benefits of hosting our own images for use on the forum. I was the in-house developer, but I was only familiar with HTML, CSS, and a smidge of Javascript if required, so I didn’t have the chops to take on such a project. Luckily another forum member who I’ve since lost contact with knew php, and so he began building code. Eager not to be left out and sensing that knowing php would be advantageous given the forum software used it too, I started pulling down his code and studying it to figure out how everything worked.
Eventually I started contributing too since most of the code was fairly similar and boilerplate (stuff like multiple gallery pages, logins, user areas etc) and the original Pixita actually became a reasonable site when put up against, for example, Imageshacks interface at the time. After some time the site was closed down (probably due to moving server or other server issues), but the interest remained and work was started on a second more advanced iteration, although that never reached working status.
I recently found a dump of code and uploaded images from some iteration of the site, but my efforts to make it work were futile. My old php projects weren’t particularly elegant and so trying to hunt down bugs is a massive pain in the neck – I figure I could write a whole new image host in the time it’d take me to get Pixita working, so it’s not really worth it. But, in the uploaded images were various screenshots – mainly showing bugs – which I’ll preserve here for future generations (and my portfolio). Maybe one day the Pixita name will rise again, until then, all we have is pictures of bugs in various iterations of the site…
