Ask HN: Documenting my child's life | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Documenting my child's life

2 pointstreis4 comments

Hi Everyone,

I'm about to become a first time father and I've been thinking about how to go about documenting my son's life. By documenting, I mean collecting all of the pictures/videos we take of him along with text descriptions of the events. Things like what we did for his 3rd birthday, his first words, when his Grandma died, etc. A sort of official record of everything that happened to him during his life. The idea being that when he's an adult he will have all of this in one place to go back to and look at when he wants.

The three main things I'm looking for are:

1) General Social Network stuff like uploading a post, pictures, etc. Possibly allowing other family members to contribute 2) The ability to download everything (pictures, posts, videos, etc.) into a single archive that comes with a html file that can be locally viewed 3) Something I can expect to exist 20 years from now

2 & 3 effectively eliminate every commercial site and anything that isn't open source in my mind.

My googling hasn't come up with anything that I think is suitable. I've come up with a few options:

(1) A self hosted Mastodon instance not connected to the fediverse. Mastodon has the most momentum behind it, but it doesn't seem to have the focus I want. It's more for short thoughts that are relevant for a relatively short amount of time.

(2) Creating my own site based on the ActivityPub standard. This is attractive because it gives me something to start on and would allow me to hook into the fediverse, if it ever really takes off. However, I can't seem to find a good basic ActivityPub library (preferrably Ruby/RoR) to use and rolling my own seems complicated.

(3) Creating the site from scratch based on my own data format. This is the simplest to get started, but it's going to be lacking in a lot of features and I'll spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

Anyone have thoughts or suggestions?

Congratulations on your forthcoming fatherhood. I'm not sure I can point to any product which is focused specifically on the "niche" you've described -- though maybe it's an opportunity because niche doesn't seem like the right word for such a huge market.

I think most people today probably resort to whatever photo solution their phone offers them (either Apple Photos or Google Photos) and probably neglect to capture the less photographical memories of raising their children. But I think the key to any solution that you use is that it needs to be quick and easy. With that said, maybe something like a self-hosted or password-protected Wordpress installation would fit your use-case. It'd automatically chronograph your entries. It's got broad support for all types of media (photos, video, audio, etc.) and you can find limitless plugins to capture calendar entries and other memorable events. Just make sure you've got a rock-solid backup system in-place so that you don't risk losing all of your entries.

If you want something more photo-focused, a self-hosted album like Koken might get you want you're looking for. It does provide the ability to blog as-well, though it's probably not as customizable as a Wordpress blog would be.

Good luck with your newborn and finding a solution to help you remember all the little moments along the way.

>With that said, maybe something like a self-hosted or password-protected Wordpress installation would fit your use-case. It'd automatically chronograph your entries. It's got broad support for all types of media (photos, video, audio, etc.) and you can find limitless plugins to capture calendar entries and other memorable events. Just make sure you've got a rock-solid backup system in-place so that you don't risk losing all of your entries.

The backup system is the problem. Once I do something like Wordpress all of the data is going to be stuck in that format in their database structure. That makes it hard to access anywhere outside of Wordpress.

As a dad of two twenty-somethings, I’d recommend spending a bit of time acquiring good photographic skills (if you don’t already have them) and especially basic portrait lighting. This will allow you to take fewer, better pictures. Which is directly related to the notion of making sure your documentation process maximizes your unfettered dad time. A few ideas that I’m really glad I did: 1) take a good natural (ie informal, unposed)portrait each birthday. 2) Audio or video record a brief “birthday interview” with age appropriate questions. 3) read/tell stories every available night before bedtime and, occasionally, record yourself telling them (covertly). As they grew older, my boys loved hearing stories from my childhood and they asked good questions in their squeaky child voices. It’s so cool to listen to those now.

I am pretty good at photography and I have a nice DSLR. Love your suggestions and they're the exact sort of thing I want a record of.

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