Future Blogging Changes

blogging :: software :: python :: twisted

Advogato has served me well over the past year, and I will continue to use it for blogging. I email a special account on one of my servers with my blog entries, and it gets published within seconds on Advogato. I have nightly cronjobs that run XML-RPC queries against Advogato and save backups (in addition to the originals which are in my "Sent" folder). This makes me very happy, as I suffered a traumatic server crash over a year ago, wherein I lost over a year's worth of world-changing blog posts.

However, I believe I am ready to take blogging back into my own hands. I managed to rescue some of the data on the drive, including early posts from 2003 and part of 2004. These are currently archived here, but I would like to unify all old posts, Advogato posts, and future posts in a single framework, look-and-feel.

As a result, I have finally broken down and started writing a collection of user-land networked applications:

• ImageDB, a small web micro-app which provides a backend upon which one could write an image gallery application like this one; uses image-tagging like del.icio.us;
• AccountsDB, which will provide distributed user and group management, authentication, as well as fine-grained permissioning with ACLs (access control lists) and ACL management for applications;
• MessageDB, which will store and index RFC 2822-compliant messages, will allow users to tag them like ImageDB and del.icio.us, as well as providing many convenient means for users and parent applications to add messages;
  
• WeBlog, which will be composed of the micro-applications MessageDB, AccountsDB, and ImageDB and provide a nice user interface for blog posts, blogs, and groups of blogs (community spaces).

This is just a handful of the full suite we are working on here.

All of these applications are small, networked, light-weight, and run independently of heavy software like Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. They are python- and twisted-powered. We have plans of implementing peering (using Q2Q/Vertex) so that, for example, a trusted network of ImageDB installations could provide images for each other (like a private, distributed, images.google.com). There are so many possible ways that this could go, it's just insanely exciting. We're talking new paradigm here, folks.

So, stay tuned. This blog-space and my account on Advogato will eventually become re-publishers of ElectricDuncan running on WeBlog ;-) And then I'll have two more backups of these techno-babble ramblings...