Meditation on tech

[vlion]

I have something like 3 computers I use. Two OSX, one Linux (Gentoo, which is reteaching me about Linux and compile).

This is a long-term problem. How do I keep documents in sync? How do I keep documents portable from OS from OS, from computer to computer. My 'Main' computer has documents from 1996 on it; I am a data packrat. How do I manage metadata?

This is a solved problem for my *modern* source code projects. git and hg have made my life vastly easier. But this is also a problem for:

- Mail (So much mail currently locked up in Mail.app)

- General documents. I like to save to disk web sites that are particularly interesting, because the web rots.

- Web Bookmarks. I've lost about 2 sets of bookmarks in the last 6-8 years. I'd like to not do this again.


I don't really think stuffing all of this in git is appropriate, as amusing as that might be. It'd be a number of gigabytes and frankly, I don't have a secure server somewhere.



I also, with the demise of posterous, plan to migrate all of my blogging to someplace that I can trust. Dreamwidth solves the problem in part; I think Rah and Mark play square. But I try to keep `vlion` generally separate from my legal name online. I would like the freedom of speech without certain of the penalties now extant online. So I need to figure out a stable blogging platform and import my real name work there (I keep a slightly unupdated technical tumblr). Also, a twitter account, again, for technical purposes.

Who owns my content? Who controls it? I'd like to say I do, but right now, I'm pretty sure that's not true.

I'd like to make it so I control my content: that I have a git repo or whatever that drives my content and my blogging, and if I want to move servers- zoom - I set up the new repo, push, configure apache, and there we have it.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Have you seen Octopress?

http://octopress.org/

[vlion]

Yes. Its in my mind as a possible solution for the own tech blogging.

By the way: I rolled up a mini-CMS based on Pandoc-flavored Markdown for my Lisp tutorial site. I should show you!

[foxfirefey]

It makes sense that you saw it, come to think of it, given your description!

[shadowspar]

FWIW, I've really come to appreciate Pinboard. They have an archiving account feature that runs $25/year; it saves both the html and all assets of every page you bookmark. You can export all your bookmarks at any time, though I'm not sure if there's a way to get the archived page data out yet.

[vlion]

Okay, yeah. That's cool.

http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/ also looks cool and isn't cloudy.

I would actually hope that the ideal situation would be to save all this information, encrypt it, and have it searchable with the same ease that we do bookmarks (or better).