We’ll be making a few minor updates to 23 tomorrow morning (Central European Time), which means that 23 will be inaccessible for a short while. The service window starts at 7:30 AM and is planned to last no longer than forty minutes.

Update: We should do everything this early in the morning. The service window ended after just fifteen minutes, and so far 23 seems to be running smoothly.

At 23 we’ve chosen to allow programmers to access our service by writing a few lines of code, and we’ve also chosen a scheme for doing this which overlaps with other photo sharing sites. This approach means that 23 can most often be supported in 3rd party application quite easily — in fact we’ve written about this before.

One example of such an application is the one written by Michele Campeotto and released in an open source fashion. This led us to try a simple experiment over the weekend: Could we rewrite an existing application to support 23 in five minutes or less. Sure! In fact, a bit of search-and-replace was enough for us to be able to release a The 23 Uploader for Linux: If you’re on a Linux system, try it out by downloading this file. Installation notes are provided in the readme file, but it’s basically just a matter of typing in a single command.

The larger point of this post? It illustrates that even the lowly programmers behind 23 can rip off and re-fashion an existing application to his own needs. So why shouldn’t you be able to do so — or at least urge smarter people than yourself to do so? If you know of a great tool for editing, sharing, uploading or sending photos, you should take charge and call on them to support 23 as well.