Tag: reclaim

why you need to host your own stuff

“Use Posterous,” they said. “It’s easy. Just write your posts there. No need to run your own blog.”

Today, Posterous announced they’ll shut down in 3 months.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Posterous will no longer be available to either view or edit. Boom. Gone.

Yet another hosted service that made it so super-easy to do stuff that you’d never ever have to waste time running your own stuff, because only stupid luddites that don’t get how awesome hosted services are would bother to waste their time doing that.

If you don’t manage your own online stuff, it will eventually disappear. If you do manage your own stuff, you need to have backups so that you can spin your stuff up on a different hosting provider when your current provider disappears.

Reclaim. Own your stuff. Step up. Pick up your game, people.

on bookmarks

Season 3, Episode #19 of “Who gives a crap?” – the one where the guy moves bookmarks around

I’d installed a copy of Scuttle a couple of years ago, and have been happily saving bookmarks on my own server since then. But I got frustrated when stuff didn’t play as nicely with my stuff, when compared to delicious.com or diigo.com or the like. IFTTT scripts. Importers. Evernote import-bookmarks-into-a-note stuff. etc…

and, I guess, I realized that bookmarks just aren’t the kind of thing that I should care enough about having full control over their hosting and storage. they’re just bookmarks. dude. unclench.

so I tried going back to delicious.com. Brian and Alan are still using it, so it felt like home. But the importer utility is currently unavailable because spammers use it to crap their stuff into delicious.com. awesome. The support folks said they could manually import my bookmarks (which had been exported from my Scuttle install, thanks to a script found by the always awesome and helpful Scott Leslie). My bookmarks magically appeared a few days later. Awesome! Except the import treated all tags on a bookmark as a single tag, ignoring the spaces that were included in the bookmarks.html file. So “mooc whitepaper toread” was stored as a single tag, rather than as 3 separate tags. Doh. And as a result, I think, the delicious.com tagging tool became dog slow when tagging new bookmarks – loading 3000 unique-and-long tags to match for keystroke autocompletion…

then I tried diigo.com. I mean, George Siemens is using it, and a bunch of other folks. I created an account, fed it my bookmarks.html file, and BOOM. all of my bookmarks are there, going back to September 2004. And they’re properly tagged.

So, after a few days, I think I’ll stay there. For now, at least. I just decommissioned my Scuttle install.

Diigo isn’t perfect either, though. I get plenty of errors in the web interface (why they don’t trap server errors rather than barfing a generic 500 SERVER ERROR page is beyond me… reloading those pages 2 or 5 times seems to make the error go away). And the javascript-powered interface seems to timeout or fail silently – I still can’t add Chris Lott to my network for some reason. Strange.

So, for now, bookmarks are at diigo.com. Is this a failure or backtrack of Project Reclaim? I don’t think so. Bookmarks aren’t something I make, they’re just pointers to stuff. Who cares where they live, as long as the host isn’t doing evil things with the data (and what evil things could they really do? dunno. low risk.)

Tent – distributed social networking

Via a post by John Gruber, Tent:

Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking. Tent users share content with apps and each other. Anyone can run a Tent server, or write an app or alternative server implementation that uses the Tent protocol. Users can take their content and relationships with them when they change or move servers. Tent supports extensible data types so developers can create new kinds of interaction.

Oh, hell yes. Sign me up. I’ll be installing the reference implementation ASAP. This distributed approach makes much more sense than the app.net model of replacing one central silo with a shiny new one…

Update: Timmmmmmmyboy reminded me about Diaspora, and asked how is Tent different? I don’t know if it is (or will be) different. It comes down to a few things:

  1. how easy it is for people to install. if it’s hard1, it will die on the vine, like diaspora did (or is doing. or whatever).
  2. how well self-hosted and service-hosted instances interoperate. if they don’t interoperate, it won’t have enough activity to make it worth using. death spiral ensues.
  3. and how well it plays with other platforms. can it post to twitter? facebook? vice versa? pinning our hopes on the chance that everyone on the planet just moves to the new platform is just not reasonable or desirable. heterogeneity. competition. etc… platforms need to play well with each other.
  4. apps that can talk to it. twitter took off because there were apps for every device that made it easy to do stuff with it2. will there be an iPhone/Android/Win8 app for this? A desktop app for win/mac? a decent web interface? etc…
  1. whereby hard is defined as “non-trivial” rather than “requires a PhD”. if an application is harder to install than, say, WordPress, it just won’t get installed and maintained by even geeky humans… [↩]
  2. and then TwitterCo™ decided to start killing third party apps… interesting… [↩]

on commercial silo-ification of online discourse

I complain about twitter, facebook, and other corporate silos as much as the next person. If only there was some alternative… Something that didn’t mine everything and everyone I know to sell that data to the highest bidder(s).

One response to this has been the development of new private commercial silos, with barriers to entry (subscription fees, or invitation requirements) that are intended to keep out the riff-raff while letting the cool and worthy folks into the conversation.

This is the wrong direction.

I am not even remotely interested in participating in the shiny new (and newly funded) app.net twitter clone/replacement, nor the online-discussion-blogosphere-replacement Branch.com. These solve the noise problem, but don’t solve the mining-my-everything-for-monetizing-synergy-blech problem1.

Then, there’s Diaspora. This project sounded extremely promising. An installable application to replace social silos like Facebook. Very interesting software, but it’ll never take off as a high-volume application run by humans, because most humans won’t be installing Ruby on Rails apps.2 Maybe, if it was offered as a one-click-installer on common web hosting providers? It’s not.

In a perfect world, I’d post my stuff to a place3 I own. Like, say, my blog4. And people who choose to follow, would see the updates alongside the rest of the folks they follow. On something they own. And vice versa. This isn’t new. RSS and PubSubHubbub, with a decent installable interface. Done.

We don’t need more silos. We need to be able to extract ourselves from them, and still be able to connect with each other. There has to be a better solution to that problem, before we continue to fragment and isolate our online interactions.

I’ll be staying with Twitter, as much as I hate it, because that’s where the people I follow are. But, I’m only staying for as long as I have to. As soon as something comes along that lets me own my stuff and follow who I want to, without exposing everything to monitoring/monetizing by central third parties, I’m gone.

  1. I’m not saying that app.net or branch.com are currently mining everything. but what’s to stop them? if I let someone else control my interactions with others, I have to give them a pretty high level of trust. I have no reason to do that with either of those services… [↩]
  2. yes, I get that it’s not too hard, and it’s something I could do, but then what? I’d get to connect with the other 36 geeks that installed it? yeah… [↩]
  3. simple, lightweight, easily installable by humans [↩]
  4. I’d experimented with “asides” here awhile back – but without the notifications layer, it was pretty much useless… [↩]

Smari McCarthy on freedom

From a great resource on P2P infrastructure, linked by @sleslie:

Freedom requires infrastructure.

A man who has no tools to acquire his necessities of life is a slave to his necessities. Given those tools, he becomes a slave to the labour required to fruitfully use them. Only by transcending each difficulty as it comes, in a process not dissimilar to metasystem transitions, can the individual achieve freedom.

Similarly, if at any point the individual becomes removed from the infrastructure that allows him any of the previous metasystem transitions, then he becomes a slave to those who control that infrastructure.

  • Smari McCarthy, FCF Discussion, February 2011

When we are using an endless list of provided infrastructure, magical clouds, startup services, and things we can’t possibly have any individual control over, how is our freedom impaired?

Self-hosting video with WordPress and Hippie Hosting Co-op

I’ve been messing around with hosting my own videos, but that’s one area where the third party services have the functionality nailed. They magically transcode video file formats. They create thumbnails. They provided embeds to make it easy to use the video. But, Jim posted about how he’s having to take on some copyfighting, because YouTube is bending over for some pretty outrageous false copyright claims. The only way to prevent a third party from misusing your content is to not use a third party.

So… I took another look for a decent, fully-featured video hosting plugin for WordPress. And, I found one that looks pretty decent – the creatively named Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator plugin. It integrates with the WordPress media library, uses ffmpeg for transcoding and thumbnail generation, and provides a flash- and HTML5- embed for easy use of the videos.

It looks like ffmpeg doesn’t understand the “up” orientation flag on videos shot with an iPhone (and probably other devices), so the only caveat is that you have to be careful to hold the device so that it’s facing “up” (I actually had to figure out what’s the “proper” way to hold an iPhone – turns out, with the volume buttons on the bottom. oops.). Windows seems to have trouble with this, as well, showing photos and videos upside down…

all along the watchtower
[FMP poster=”http://www.darcynorman.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/20120616-214038_thumb1.jpg” width=”840″ height=”473″]http://www.darcynorman.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/20120616-214038.mov[/FMP]
Right-click or ctrl-click this link to download.

If you’re using the Hippie Hosting Co-op, ffmpeg is now available. After installing the plugin, set your “path to ffmpeg” setting to point to “/usr/bin”, and you’re off and running. Adjust the default settings however you like (I set mine to embed video 840px wide).

[FMP poster=”http://www.darcynorman.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Screen-Recording_thumb4.jpg” width=”840″ height=”525″]http://www.darcynorman.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Screen-Recording.mov[/FMP]

Owning Your Own Words – Is It Important?

An interesting discussion on owning your own content, ironically hosted on a private beta third party discussion service.

Gina Trapani, on maintaining control as future-proofing legacy:

For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web–even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful–I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.

Anil Dash, on preservation of culture:

I don’t presume that my work is particularly important or worth preserving, but we lose a great deal of cultural documentation when our default bias is towards disposability. There are lots of people who are creating important parts of culture, but are doing so on platforms that default towards throwing our creations away. This becomes particularly acute when we realize that folks like MG, who’ve been paid to create these works, can’t even count on their works living on.

Will all of the Instagram/Posterous/etc… content still be around in a decade or three? Will they wind up being better archives than self-hosted stuff that disappears when executors stop paying hosting renewals?

via Owning Your Own Words – Is It Important? – Branch™

on reclaiming dropbox with owncloud

In the Reclaim project, I’ve been struggling to find a way to properly access my files from anywhere – Dropbox has that problem solved handily.

I’ve been watching ownCloud for awhile, and it’s getting to the point where it’s just about ready to use as a self-hosted Dropbox replacement. Previous versions had web- and webDAV interfaces, but didn’t have the ability to sync files to each computer I use. The web interface worked, but was too awkward to actually use for anything. And using webDAV directly was so frustratingly slow that it was basically a non-option (saving a large file to webDAV has to upload the entire file each time you hit command+s, which can lock up the application you’re using until it’s done. not fun).

But, ownCloud version 4 now has desktop syncing clients for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Interesting. So, I updated my ownCloud installation to the latest version, and installed the client on my home Mac laptop. And it worked. I’ve since added the client to my Windows 7 laptop at work, and a second Mac laptop. Files seem to be happily syncing between all three computers.

Out of the box, it wants to sandbox the desktop-synced files into a clientSync folder. I didn’t think that was a bad idea, so I went with the defaults. And then realized the web interface doesn’t provide access to the clientSync folder. Doh! So I re-set-up ownCloud to use the root of my ownCloud server’s directory (well, the directory for my user), and now it feels like an actual Dropbox replacement. Very cool. I can save files like usual, and they get magically uploaded to the server in the background. And there’s versioning as well, so it should be possible to undo Something Bad (touch wood).

Yeah. Ignore the scary warning. Leave “Folder on ownCloud” blank. Sync the whole thing.

ownCloud 4 is a dramatic improvement, especially with the desktop sync clients, but it’s still not quite ready for prime time. The sandboxed-clientSync folder issue wasn’t fatal, but was confusing. Easy to fix. And the client software is definitely in the early stages, lacking the maturity of the Dropbox clients (which, to be fair, are developed by a large, well-funded company, and have been under active development for years now, while ownCloud is in a 1.0 initial release).

Things I miss from the Dropbox client, when using the ownCloud client:

  • full status indication – Dropbox tells you how many files need to be synced, what % are remaining, etc… ownCloud gives you an opaque “Sync is running.” message – often with cryptic error messages that don’t seem to actually bork anything.
  • file-and-folder icon badges – has the file I just saved been synced to the server? Dropbox shows a green checkbox on files that have been taken care of. ownCloud, not so much (yet?)
  • simplify the client. ownCloud offers the capability to mount different folders from the server to different folders on your computer. I’m sure that makes sense to the developers. No average user will do that. Just sync the entire user’s ownCloud directory to the ownCloud folder on their computer. Simple. Treat folders inside that specially, if needed – maybe Pictures, Documents, Public. Music. Movies. But just sync the main ownCloud folder to keep things simple.
  • sharing files to people that don’t have an account on the ownCloud server – Dropbox lets me share a file and create a public URL so I can send files easily to anyone in a safe, read-only way. ownCloud seems to only want me to share files with people using the same ownCloud server instance.
  • running the ownCloud client at login. trivial to do via System Preferences on my Mac, or wherever the hell that’s handled on Windows, but a simple checkbox “start automatically” (or something user-friendlier) would be handy for non-geeks.
  • stability of the ownCloud client. I’ve noticed a couple of times that the icon has disappeared from the menu bar or taskbar. Relaunching the ownCloud client puts it back, but it shouldn’t need babysitting.
  • polish. the Mac client mentions something about the taskbar. There’s no taskbar on the Mac. Clearly text recycled from the Windows client. Again, not a big deal.
  • Menubar/taskbar icon needs refinement – the “syncing” and “synced” versions are hard to distinguish. How to better display that in an icon? Maybe a green dot for synced, something else to show syncing, an something else to show problems. or something.

Actually, that’s basically it. ownCloud is getting dramatically better with every revision – and the next version is scheduled for August. Can’t wait to see how far it comes. It’s got some handy stuff I’ll play around with (but don’t really need – calendar, contacts, photos, etc…)

In the meantime, I’m going to try sticking with my ownCloud server, and avoid using Dropbox. In my ~24 hours of experimentation, it looks like it’s going to work. Unless Something Horrible happens, I’ll stick with ownCloud. Happily hosting my files on the cloud, on the Hippie Hosting Co-op server. I’m now syncing over 600MB of files across 3 computers, which should be a good test. Also, I’ll likely need to throw a few more bucks into the Hippie Hosting bucket to cover the disk usage…

Update: after a couple days of trying out ownCloud with the desktop syncing, it’s just not reliable enough to use yet. syncs may fail. the client app may silently crash. I lost some files somehow. It’s getting close, but not quite ready for production use yet. Back to Dropbox for now…

reclaimed photo galleries

When I nuked my Flickr account, I had planned on migrating some of the sets onto my own website somehow, but wasn’t sure how, and wasn’t sure it was important to hurry along. Then Jen mentioned something about missing being able to look through a couple of the old sets. Dang. OK. That was the nudge I needed.

One of the things I missed from my now-nonexistent Flickr account was the “Sets” page, with links to historical photo sets. Easy to rectify. I just exported a bunch of the more relevant/interesting/fun sets from Aperture, as static “web page” exports. I created a “gallery” folder on the server, and dumped them all in there. I could have just let directory indexing provide an ugly automatic menu of photo sets available, but that’s not good enough. So I googled together some simple PHP code that builds a visual gallery page, with links to each photo set.

The thumbnails are pulled by randomly picking an image in the “thumbnails” folder in each set. They’re different each time the gallery page loads. I also added in a link to my “ephemera” photostream. There’s no RSS, no comments, no animated-GIF-unicorn-awards. Just the photos.

I picked a photo size of 840px because it’s big enough, and is coincidentally the same as the width of my blog posts so if I want to use any of the photos, I can just use them directly without any futzing.

my hosting/publishing/sharing setup

Time for another reclaim project update, after nuking my Flickr account. What am I running, and what is my workflow? Well, I’m running almost everything on my Hippie Hosting Co-op account, including:

  • my main blog
    • all media is posted there – either in a full blog post, or in the ephemeral media section
    • I use a bunch of plugins, all listed on my colophon page
  • links (running a self-hosted copy of Scuttle )
  • rss reader ( Fever˚ )
  • url shortener (Shaun Inman’s lessn, with no tracking or administration)
  • feed2js, for doing fun things with rss feeds on web pages
  • about mini-site. static html.
  • 1998-style home page, using my instance of feed2js to tie in feeds in a handy dandy dashboard

Most of my posts are made as photos using the WordPress app on my iPhone. I have it in the main app bar, so it’s always just one click away. Photos are lately taken most often using the great 6×7 app on my phone (not owned by Facebook, not tied to any service – all it does is take a photo quickly, and save it to my camera roll where I can quickly post it using the WordPress app).

My default category for new posts is “ephemera” so I don’t have to select any categories when posting photos from my phone. I use a plugin that I wrote, which filters all “ephemera” posts from the front page and main feed so that the 4 subscribers aren’t inundated by photos. I use a second plugin that I wrote that tells the Twitter WordPress plugin to tweak the tweet announcing posts – so “ephemera” posts have “(media)” inserted in the twoot to prevent Scott from blowing a gasket at all of the tootbot noise…

Bigger “real” posts (like this one) are written using the WordPress web interface. I used to use MarsEdit, which is really great software and I love it, but WordPress’ interface has gotten good enough that I really don’t need a separate app. And, with the Markdown QuickTags plugin, it’s actually easier and faster to use the native web interface. It also handles media uploads really nicely, which is handy (and the biggest reason I used to use a separate standalone app for writing stuff – the media uploads used to be easier that way).

The only things I’m not hosting myself are my Google account (which isn’t used much, and I still use DuckDuckGo for 99% of my searching because it doesn’t feed the beast), my Facebook account (which only exists because I have family and friends that don’t exist online outside of Facebook), and Twitter (which is like ephemeral social glue).

One nice thing about running everything on my own (co-op hosted) server, is that I can back everything up at once. I can use something like rsync to suck my entire hosting account directory onto my laptop, so I’ve got a backup in case Bad Things Happen. That’s hard, or impossible, using distributed hosted services…

What have I lost by hosting it myself? Not much. Some of the community connections, perhaps, but most of that has been happening in Twitter anyway, so that’s not a big deal.

What have I gained by hosting it myself? I own it. Nobody can say “hey. we sold our company to these guys. good luck with that.” And nobody – nobody tracks what people do here. I have the static apache logs, but that is a crude and completely anonymous aggregate of activity. Nothing directly feeds Google’s (or any other company’s) machines for tracking and monitoring and monetizing (I don’t use any third-party analytics packages, so there shouldn’t be any tracking except from YouTube and Vimeo hosted videos). That’s worth doing it all myself, right there.

Worst case scenario, if Hippie Hosting Co-op’s orbiting server platform goes offline for some reason, almost everything I publish becomes temporarily unavailable. That’s not really a big risk. The world could do with a little less noise. And, eventually, my stuff would become available again and balance would be restored. Whew.

update: I thought of some other key tools that I use that I’m not hosting myself, but would love to find a way to do so:

  • google docs. no way out of this one, aside from emailing documents around again. nope.
  • evernote (I basically live in this, but am kind of queasy about the amount of my private/secure data that’s residing on a company’s servers somewhere)
  • dropbox – I’ve played with owncloud, but it’s just not as seamless as dropbox, especially for automagically syncing across many devices
  • icloud – likely no way out of this one. it’s an email account and iOS backup, but also tied to Ping, GameCenter, and other things Apple.

and other services that are hosted elsewhere but I just don’t care because they’re meaningless (but I’d consider nuking them just to throw a shoe into the machinery of ubiquitously tracking everyone):

  • linkedin. really? do people actually use this?
  • facebook. it’s full of people. and creepy monitoring/monetizing.
  • likely a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember because they’re silly and meaningless web 2.0 noise…