I ran a free image hosting service in 1997. 1997, when the internet was still young, and, well, anyone who wanted to have a website ponied up the $35/yr for the privilege of the domain, and another $10-$100/month to host it. It was written in Perl, and was an unholy mess. I probably could have fudged it in a Bourne script.

These days, people don’t want to bother logging into their free hosting to share a cute picture they just found when browsing MySpace.

I’m guilty of this, too. If it takes more than an extra 5 seconds, is it really worth sharing? Sometimes.

Enter ImagePup. It doesn’t have the ton of obnoxious ads that ImageShack is now toting, and since it’s mine, I don’t have to worry about it being gone tomorrow – unless, well, I want it to be gone.

Featuring the joys of HTML 3.2 markup (Hey, Netscape 4 and Lynx still deserve SOME love..) with JavaScript supported AdSense ads (What? Hosting still isn’t all free!), two clicks, and one copy/paste, and you’re done. No intrusive popups, popunders, or the unholy flash ad.

I will be tweaking the design slightly, so it’s not quite so combersome giving you the multitude of options for displaying, sharing, or consuming your image of choice: Just another little way of turning back the clock, and giving back, while hoping to have it sustain itself.