One quick look can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I really don’t do anything to my site these days. It’s got a tiny blog, it hosts my music, has a short and egotistical bio, some outdated links, and a contact form. What else could I possibly need?
But what I’ve noticed these days is a trend toward having everyone else host your stuff. It’s kind of back to Ye Olde Good Days of the internet, the times in which I grew up. When I was a kid, if you wanted an online presence and had no money, it was Angelfire or GeoCities (who remembers those terrible long URLs with the neighborhoods and the addresses… oh man!). But of course there were space and bandwidth limitations, so those got old. That and they started shutting down and whatnot. Then we all grew up and got our own domains and started paying for hosting. And now, somewhere along the way, we reverted right back to having other people host our stuff for us, often for free!
There are clear benefits to both approaches. Managing your own stuff affords you the ability to do just that: manage your own stuff. My domain, my rules. However, as we all well know by now, with great power comes great responsibility! Like uh, you have to pay for it. That, and you’ve got to keep all your third-party code updated. For example, I use WordPress to run this little blog-wannabe, and every other week there’s some horrible dramatic issue that requires patching immediately or I risk someone destroying my entire blog. Or something. I don’t know. But frankly, it gets old pretty quickly and I seriously wouldn’t mind never having to jerk around with it again!
I’d continue by saying that the benefit to having someone else host, say, my blog, is that all I have to do is bang away at the keyboard and click Publish. Done. But that’s really not true because I hate all the available Blogger templates and I’m probably going to have to design my own if I’m ever going to be satisfied. Ugh. Would you believe that there aren’t any sleek black and blue designs? AT ALL? Or they’ve all got some horrible header image that just destroys the whole thing, or they’re too narrow, whatever. I want to post code samples — narrow little blog columns are not good for that. Very not good.
I’m a bit nervous about the prospect of decentralizing everything, though. I mean I’d still have to host my own music because I don’t know where I’d put 800 MB of Mp3s… unless that’s peanuts to free hosts these days… heck and maybe it is, I haven’t really looked! If it is, the case for ditching the paid host becomes much stronger. Oh, er, except for the whole decentralized thing, like I was saying. If someone gets acquired, or if their servers just get knocked down for a day, I’m up a creek. I’m at THEIR mercy. Yikes. What if someone decides my blog has objectionable content because I say nasty things about religious zealots or something?
Truth is that I’d really like to start posting more of my thoughts online. Start discourses about every little thing, I don’t know. Little code tricks I discover whilst working with C# every day. Shows like LOST, Fringe, Venture Brothers, Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes… and there’s plenty to talk about with all the changes occurring in America, or at least the attempted changes which seem a little constipated right now (health care, for instance: frankly I’m all for universal care for citizens! About damn time!).
For reference, I’m experimenting with Blogger here at the moment. I don’t know if it will amount to anything. I don’t know if I’ll like it enough to bother maintaining it or making a template for it (which is bound to look a lot like this site, because frankly I still like the concept). There’s a possibility of course that I’ll just… somehow switch over to it entirely. It’s all up in the air right now. Perhaps I won’t do anything at all!
The world waits with baited breath for me to make a decision…
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