I've been disinterestedly watching one of those "Live" doctor TV shows, where a prominent (or publicity-hungry) member of the medical fraternity decides to take questions from telephone callers and disperses advise. Most of these shows, at least here in India, take a spot in News networks at various non-prime time slots of the day. I'm quite surprised that people actually bother calling, to be honest. Most of these gems of wisdom are just common sense suggestions wrapped in semi-scientific jargon and more often than not, these doctors always ask viewers to consult their own doctors for specific advice. I mean, anybody with a little knowledge of human anatomy could answer such questions.

The only value of these programmes seem to be to fill up time. Of course, there is the occasional specialist who has useful knowledge to share, but most of them seem (understandably) reluctant to go beyond vague generalities. To my mind, such programmes do their bit to encourage self-medication more than anything else.

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I'm trying to write a simple, SQLite-driven blogging tool optimized to displaying images. This is because I'm yet to find a lightweight blogging tool that doesn't take up megabytes of storage space and a MySQL database. I also don't like the current crop of "image gallery" or "photo album" scripts either, most of which are bloated, feature rich and use thumbnail-generation which is suited for high-resolution photographs rather than comic strips.

SQLite seems a very good option for small applications. It suits a lightweight image blogging tool which will organize images in simple categories and require no thumbnail displays. It'll be light on features which other blog software consider standard. Most likely I'll release the source code under the GPL.

The only problem with SQLite is that most PHP setups don't have the SQLite module installed by default. But I'm determined not to use MySQL for this as it will defeat the whole purpose of simplicity.

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I've had it in my mind to write one or two tutorials/HOWTOs here, but I'm not sure how many people will really benefit from them.

It all depends on whether you really want to see a tutorial on creating comics in Linux. The other is one on how to add a basic RSS/Atom feed to a static website (or one which isn't powered by a dynamic script with a built-in syndication mechanism).

If anybody is interested, let me know and I'll get myself to do them.