Flutterby™! : Google+ 2011-07-22 21:01:17.873951+00

Google+

2011-07-22 21:01:17.873951+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

Posted to my Google+ account:

As others have noted, Skud's account on Google+ is gone, presumably over the "no pseudonyms" rule (this place is largely nerds anyway, I'd imagine that nobody thinks of Skud by her given name anyway). Since I talk with most of y'all on other forums, and really the only person I follow who's posting original content here is using a pseudonym, I'm not sure how much longer my Google+ participation will continue.

No RSS. No APIs. Hamhanded social policies. Kinda making Facebook look responsible, frankly. But, really, let's all get back to using our own blogs, shall we? The world was way better then.

I'm headed back towards even more of my own CMSs, the hassle of hacking in cool features within someone else's idea of "easy", combined with the problems inherent in trying to figure out what plugin code I can and can't trust and the struggles with keeping the spammers and scammers out of the exploits available in a monoculture have become too much.

But I'm totally fine if you want to run Wordpress or Joomla whatever on your own domain, because then you'll at least own your own data, have a distributed system, and RSS feeds and be participating in the web at large.

I've thought about this for the past week or so, and I came to the realization that I can't really question why someone who wrote their own engine no longer uses it, because I'm guilty of the same thing, only it's not a weblog engine but a programming language I wrote in college (and even used for several projects, both in college and at work) that I no longer use (it's been over fifteen years since I last used it). I have my excuses but frankly, I came to realize that Forth-like syntax really sucks for real-world programming.

So I can kind of understand it. But then again, not only did I write my own blogging engine, I also wrote my own anti-spam email program so maybe I'm just a masochist when it comes to these things.

I wrote my own blogging system (twice). Between all the "must have" features that have grown over the years, plus fighting spam comments, I just got tired of spending my spare time maintaining the system which I could have been writing. So my "professional" writing has moved to wordpress because I don't have to worry about anything (I have local copies thanks to the blogging tool MarsEdit) on the technical side. And I use facebook for distributing "here are the funny / bizarre / nerdy links" that friends seem to like.

#Comment Re: made: 2011-07-26 17:39:45.330169+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Echoing other_todd, I'm another who wrote my own CMS and then abandoned it. I've written three of them, in fact, each for a specific site, but these days I just throw wordpress on the server and have done with it. CMSes are boring and I have better things to do with my time than hack on them. I lose nothing by using Wordpress, since the code and data all live on my server anyway. I still have full control; I can tweak the code myself if I want to, and have occasionally done so.

I've been musing recently about the vague idea of a "web operating system": some kind of pluggable environment for server-side personal data management. I want a way to distribute "apps" that get data from some generic data source and do something with them: an email frontend, perhaps, that can talk to any old IMAP server; a calendar frontend, etc. I can pick which desktop-side GUI apps I use to read email or manage my calendar, so why can't I pick which server-side web apps I use to perform the same functions?

I'm imagining a sort of web-centric remote desktop which provides a frontend to whatever data servers I've elected to store my stuff on, onto which I can load and unload various modules, and to which I can create hyperlinks for others to use.

I wrote three or four CMSes of various degrees of sophistication for myself over the years. But I don't care to reinvent the wheel and I don't care to devote a lot of programming time to my personal site; I program for pay, not for free. (And my sites have never had enough visitors that I could pretend I was writing the CMS for anything other than my own needs.) Right now the site on my own server uses MediaWiki (as you and Dan know, Sean, but others here don't), and the site I post to most is at Tumblr. There are problems with both, but those problems are not severe enough to induce me to go back to doing it myself.

The point about not owning your own thoughts is well-made - that's one of many reasons why I stopped posting journal entries on sites I did not myself control, such as LiveJournal. It's also the reason that the things I post on Tumblr are ephemera which I wouldn't miss if they vanished tomorrow, and that I don't mind (in fact, encourage) being reposted all over the web.

In short, while I understand being deeply suspicious of places where your content is in someone else's untouchable cloud, I can't continue to make the case that there is a sound economic basis for maintaining your own site-content code, rather than obtaining a reasonably reliable product which you control your own instance of completely (e.g. MediaWiki, a WordPress installation, etc.)

#Comment Re: made: 2011-07-23 07:44:50.754068+00 by: spc476 [edit history]

On a somewhat unrelated note—Dan, your CMS munges HTML entities when you go back to edit a posted entry. If I go back and edit this message, for example, then my — above will apear in the edit box as “&;”.

#Comment Re: made: 2011-07-23 07:40:25.89163+00 by: spc476 [edit history]

Flutterby is one of the few sites I follow that started out with a homebrew CMS and is still using it. Just about every other person out there that wrote their own system abandoned it over time (leaving me with a mixture of pity and anger that I can't quite pin down yet). Some, because all the Cool Kids™ were using The CMS-du jour and we can't be not cool; others because they didn't want the bother of running their own server (but now have the bother of constant security upgrades that most likely will break something).

I think Google+ is more of the same—all the Cool Kids™ are using it, and why bother with running servers and crap (I'll tell you why—because otherwise, you won't own your own thoughts otherwise, that's why!).

I'm not saying that everyone has to write their own CMS—not everyone can, but I am upset at those that did and stopped using them.