Life Publishing

Thu Dec 30 23:41:08 2004

There is a lot of movement from certain parts of the internet population towards publishing the details of their life. This may include thoughts, photographs, todo lists, calenders, that sort of thing.

The majority of it is for the benefit of the publisher and a couple of friends. Some grow so large that thousands of people read their thoughts, and look at their holiday photographs.

There is some very good on-line software to organise this sort of thing for you, and most of it can be locked down so that only yourself, or selected friends can see the content if you so desire. Unfortunately it doesn't seem ideal to be uploading all your photos to a site on the internet, just so that you can organise them for yourself. It seems kinda wasteful. What you need is something that you can run locally, to organise your life, and optionally publish parts of it to the big wide interweb, possibly limited to sets of people.

The major pieces are there. Good blogging software can be run locally. Passable photo galleries exist in their millions. I'm not sure why I think it just isn't complete. I want to have Furl , Flickr , Blogger , Bloglines , Gmane and probably more all running on my machine where I have control of my data, and I want the ability to authorise people from some central authority to view the published content, so that they don't have to create yet another username and password, oh, and I want the moon on a stick. Maybe when I have all this I will be happy, or maybe it will just make me want more.

All this blog software, and integrating it, and adding RSS/Atom feeds of everything looks like good fun. If only I had some content. This is part of the driver towards me having a separate, dynamic blog, which I can do this with. The only thing is that, although I don't want to write my own system to blog with, I do want to have the fun of fiddling. I think I will try to go with Blojsom as it is a java version (losely based I think) on Bloxsom which I am using at the moment for this site. This should give me some scope for adding extra features.