Owning Your Cloud Data (Part II of Data Ownership on the Web)

This was originally posted on my new website, where you can read the full post. Please subscribe to the new feed there to follow new things I write.
 
The most well known, yet still problematic, area of data ownership in our web-based world is all the data we keep housed "in the cloud" in the machines of the services we use every day.

• The contents of your blog at Tumblr
• The documents your company shares on Google Drive
• Your to-do list at Nozbe or Remember the Milk
• The music you've bought and listen to at Amazon
• All your family photos kept safely (you hope) on Flickr

All of these services hold the information that is important to you, that you depend on, in many cases defines a large part of who you are (your writings, your photos, your musical tastes). How often do you plan for these services having a major outage? Or vanishing entirely and forever? Or suffering some kind of terrible data loss?

read more at www.ironfroggy.com/on/web-data-ownership/owning-your-cloud-data

I am burning out - My First Post at Medium

I haven’t burnt out, yet, but I can feel it coming. I’m not sure if this is something I can avoid, something inevitable, or maybe something I can soften the blow on and make a little less painful. I think there is a burn out on the way, and I’m going to at least be observant.

Read the rest of my post at Medium

The Problem With Web Data

This is a repost from my new website. Please follow my new blog for future updates.


What does it mean to "own" my data in a web-based world? I don't know what this means, but we should.

Before the growing responsibilities of "The Web" is for us, owning my data meant the files sat on my own machine. It meant the files were in a format that was either human readable, or documented well enough that alternative tools could read it or convert it. It meant no vendor could die, or change its mind, and make my data useless to me.

This isn't the case in the web today.

read the rest of this post

On Private Software

This was originally posted on my new website, where you can read the full post. Please subscribe to the new feed there to follow new things I write.

Private software is software one writes only for themselves and never shares or intends to share. It isn't commercial, because it isn't sold or even distributed at all. It isn't open source, but it shares something in spirit. I write about this in favor, though like all things, on a case by caes basis.

I'm coming to really enjoy the idea of private software. Private software made by a person to solve a personal need and none other. It is, at its surface, very contrary to what you might expect Open Source to be about, but in a way I believe it to be a great shining example of the ideals open source comes from.

read more at www.ironfroggy.com/on-private-software

Jules 0.2 Released

This originally posted to my new site and has been reposted for anyone following my old feeds. Please subscribe to my new website.

I've released version 0.2 of Jules today, which is actually the first packaged version released. There are no users other than me, so no care was taken in backwards compatibility and this is less announcing a new verison and more an announcement of the project as a whole.

Jules is a static blog generator named after a victorian-ish era literary or intellectual character, because that's a trendy thing to do. (Jekyl, Hyde, Nikola, etc.)

The design is flexible and plugin-oriented. Much of the built-in functionality is available through a set of plugins, which creates an architecture very prone to adaptation and customization. One of the major goals (though not yet reached) is template impartiality.

Today, Jules is a very capable little static website generator you may find useful for your personal, project, or organization site.

You can install Jules easily with

pip install jules

Which will install the latest version from PyPI.