Rui CarmoI guess I’ve crossed something of a threshold over the past few months. Not only have I started tossing stuff I would ordinarily micro-manage myself (like e-mail and RSS) onto Google’s servers, but I’ve also started drafting entire pieces on Google Docs and, to my amazement, even embraced last.fm as my main source of music1.
But back to the web arena. Were it not for the fact that Google hasn’t yet unveiled a Wiki (yes, I’m one of those people waiting to see what comes out of their JotSpot acquisition), and given my current leanings, I would probably have already started planning for moving the entirety of this site there.
Which, in a way, is worrisome, at least in the sense that one of the reasons why I decided to go with a Wiki engine for this site years ago was that I would have a lot more control over the relationships of individual bits of content than on a “regular” blog – a requirement which I carried over to Yaki, and which this site manages to do more than adequately.
The current version of the engine (which will soon be committed to the Google Code repository) has achieved a great balance between performance and tweak-ability, something I achieved mostly by dint of spending as little time on it as possible, which made for spartan, lean (and mostly fluff-free) code.
But there is such a thing as priorities, and right now expending any significant amount of effort in a trendy web presence isn’t one of them – unless, of course, there is some fun to be had, which is why I keep writing and tweaking bits and bobs here and there – like full-text search, which I just updated2 to support AND and NOT terms using “+” and “-”.
Still, doing heavy lifting or brand new scaffolding like rolling my own feed reader, maintaining my own servers and adding the newest bleeding edge features to the site have to take a back seat for a while, and it’s nice to have online services to turn to.
Who knows, I might even find a use for .Mac, limited and outdated as it is.
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1 Mind you, I always thought CDs were pretty pointless, and not just as coasters. Plus if there is something that tickles my fancy where it regards both finding people with similar interests and exploring new things, it’s music, and their approach to it, despite being somewhat irritating in a few aspects (why can’t I, a subscriber, search for and listen to more than 30 seconds of something I heard only a couple of hours back?), has been great for finding new artists.
2 This too will be pushed to Google Code soon. I’ve been messing around with a development branch of this site that merges quite a few oddball enhancements and fixes, and will eventually get around to cleaning those up for public consumption.