Settling in with my data

I’ve continued on my project to bring data back into my control and to stop sites from leveraging my information to gather my friend’s data. (Want to see Kurt’s Flickr pix? Just register on Yahoo!)

I installed Gallery on my web site and found a great script for exporting photos from Flickr to Gallery. Once I moved all of my files over to Gallery, I put up a signpost on my Flickr account pointing people to the new location.

If I want to post pictures with some level of security, I can create custom users in Gallery without gathering any information from my friends or family. Or spamming them, or selling their names to countless list marketers.

Mail is working well. I’m using IMAP on my webhost and using Portable Thunderbird on my key drive. My mail archive is still sitting on their servers; as soon as I’m sure I’ve moved everything over I’ll delete the archives.

Moving back to my own hosted services has inspired me to clean up my web site, which had gotten a little weed-bound during the Web 2.0 boom. I did some cleanup work, added a splash page to my site, found a new template for my blog (you’re reading it now) and cleaned up my photo blog.

IM has proved a little more problematic. I have my own Jabber server, but I do a lot of IM over my phone, and Google Talk seems to work better with their own service. Friends of mine are still married to their respective IM networks (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, and others) and so I’m stuck there.

I am hosting the Yahoo! LOMO-SF list, a photo walkabout group that’s been on-again, off-again. I’m considering moving it to a mailing list or moving to an install of phpBB on my web site. Ditto for the SMC Barricade router support group I run.

Both groups are similar - low traffic, static storage needs (for pictures or router images) and email/web access. It should be simple to make one solution work for both equally well.

All in all, this doesn’t feel as 2001 as I thought it would…

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Technorati Tags: hosting, mail, privacy, services, web

Good luck with getting your friends over to Jabber. My attempts have all mostly failed. I have, however, discovered that my life got a little better without all those annoying IM conversations popping up on my screen.

I like the pull-data model much better than I like push-data. So IM never worked for me anyway. I really do prefer email.