Head in the cloud, feet on the ground

created 17 February 2009 in notes tagged cloud, delicious, flickr, meta and syndication.

I agree with Jeremy’s ‘why is all my data in the cloud again?‘ question. I keep getting pangs about this, which is why the vast majority of the content on jerakeen.org isn’t ‘native’ to the site, but syndicated in from elsewhere. is a syndication of my delicious links. Likewise I have and for my Flickr photos and Twitters. This stuff isn’t there because I expect anyone to actually read it on my site, it’s there so that I have a local copy of all my data in a database that I own and can back up.

I like using the cloud. For instance, the reason I use delicious is primarily as a broadcast mechanism, so that other people see things I bookmark. I don’t expect people to actually follow all the feeds off jerakeen.org, but plenty follow my delicious feed. Similarly, I use Flickr because of the social features. I like having all my data on my own site, but I don’t pretend that anyone other than me cares.

Also, jerakeen.org is in practice more of a CV (hey, look what I wrote!) than a website. I spend more time on the code that powers it than on the content that goes into it.