For the past six months or so, I’ve been wrestling with where to put all of my Internet content. I create various things from time to time, and I like them being available and visible (and in many cases, open for modification and redistribution, a la MIT license or Creative Commons). But I’m at the point where many of the services I’ve used for a long time are no longer doing it for me.
- Photos: For the past six years, I've posted pictures on Flickr. The platform has been left to decay ever since Yahoo bought it, and a lot of their user base has left. The recent iPhone app upgrade is probably too little and too late. (Especially since I'm not an iPhone person.) I've experimented with some other services, including Instagram, but none seem quite as open, simple, and powerful as Flickr was (and still is).
- Programming projects: I've got a code page here that I assembled when I was looking for jobs. I've got a lot of Greasemonkey on UserScripts.org, but I think it's been abandoned (emails are bouncing and there have been no blog updates for 18 months), and it was never that great to begin with. What I'd like is something that's useful for both technical friends (navigate my code easily, like GitHub) and non-technical ones to (download UserScripts and play with some of the interactive things I've made).
- Minor thoughts: Last month, I found that I'd read very little on Facebook that I cared about. I've taken a bit of time away, and realized I don't miss it that much. I'm still sorta active on Twitter, but as far as network effects, it's not nearly as powerful. I'm not sure what I want from this sort of social network, but I do know that Facebook had it. It's just too bad that the downside (uninteresting noise) of Facebook outweigh it. Perhaps the answer is just a friend list purge.
I’m no longer at the point in my life where I want to reinvent the wheel for any of these things. I want a simple solution that allows me to do what I’m interested in doing. (That’s apparently: taking pictures, writing small bits of code, complaining, and moving on.) Simplifying my blog back in the fall was one part of this struggle, but it was really just a tiny step.