Owning My Data ⇒

October 1st, 2012 by

For a while now, I have become more aware of the "dangers" of not controlling my content. It seems every service/site wants to hold onto your data and not let you do anything with it. Which means if they go away or change their model, you are screwed.

Two things pushed me over the edge. The first was Twitter. Previous to their douchbaggery, I was archiving my tweets with IFTTT & Evernote (another proprietary system…sheesh). The second was this post by Frederico. Combined they made me realize I need to take control before more of my content "disappears".

To gain control, I must automatically get local copies of everything in an open(ish) format for easy access. The challenge is setting up the automation so Christine can do what she wants, but I get the control I want. In order of importance:

  1. Photos
  2. Blog posts
  3. Tweets (especially the links)
  4. Facebook posts
  5. Email

Photos are ok in the near term as everything is in iPhoto and I'm pretty sure iPhoto will be around for at least a few years. I will investigate the export + Hazel that Frederico has at a later date to see if I can automate it without losing the ease-of-use we get from iPhoto.

My blog is currently Wordpress that is hosted at Dreamhost. While the blog is not very active (hopefully going to change that), there is a lot of old posts that I'd hate to lose. I really like the idea of storing all the posts in Markdown formatted text files. My main challenge is that I don't really want to host things myself but I still want full control of the content. A couple of options here:

  1. automatically backup every post via some kind of Wordpress plugin
  2. change my blog to be based on text files

Option 1 sounds kind of ooky for me and I suspect requires maintenance. For option 2, I have found Site44 and Scriptogr.am. Site44 means I have to find a template and adapt it and make changes to HTML/CSS, which is not fun for me. I'm leaning towards Scriptogr.am as it allows me to get going quickly and the default theme is decent enough to get going, though I'm not sure how long it will stick around (no paid accounts).

I will also need to export my Wordpress blog into Markdown, but that looks doable, though tricky.

Next post, Twitter, Facebook & email.

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