From samharrelson.com to sam.harrelson.fm
I’ve had the “samharrelson.com” domain since 2006 and I’ve used it as the primary site of my personal blog since that time. I’ve also had my personal email there (along with a set of paid Google Apps which I’ve just recently moved away from).
However, I started considering whether or not I could move my family to some sort of .harrelson domain that would stay in our family’s possession, complete with backend storage for photos, files and memories. That would eliminate my/our reliance on corporations promising not to be evil or companies willing to brashly make decisions for me.
Also, I’m looking to do something along similar lines with student blogs/digital portfolios in my 8th Grade Science class over at Griffin Science. Basically, I’d like to equip each student with a subdomain that would have either a WordPress install or point to a blogging/site service of the student’s choosing. So, each kid would have sam.griffinscience.com for perpetuity (if they’d like) but they’d certainly be able to have a copy of their work for the year.
So, I came up with the harrelson.fm (on a Media Temple server) idea as sort of a test bed for GriffinScience as well as a way to scratch the indy itch I’ve had about my family’s data. On Twitter, Margaret made the excellent suggestion that .fm could be short for “.family” which I think is just fantastic.
If you check out harrelson.fm, you’ll see links to Anna, our daughters (and my parents in the coming days). They’ve each got a large web disk that’s triple backed up online and offline, an email account like sam@harrelson.fm and they can either have a blog/site install or go with a cname pointer (which is what Anna did). We also have a family calendar up (nifty Webcalendar install) as well as a family photo gallery and a shared file for docs, budgets, etc. I also get to admin my parents’ email and sites/blogs (hope they do blog).
I’m excited to see how this works and eventually how it works for GriffinScience.
I’m a firm believer in having a central (and independent… corporate free) hub of presence on the web. Hopefully this will be my answer. Now if I can only get in on Dave Winer’s Scripting2 experiment so I can take things to a whole different level of blogging and presence!
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Love the harrelson.fm new domain. However, it seems to me that the only stable thing about your online presence is that you will keep changing aspects of your online presence (wasn't it just a week ago when you said you'd always stay with sam@samharrelson.com). I love it, though. It's quintessentially you. Don't change a thing…except, of course, for your online presence.
Yep, you are completely right. I knew I had to provide a post with a rationale after such a doouble-take. However, I really want to make sure that all this “stuff” our family is generating has some staying power in a place that isn't owned by the company du jour.
We'll see, but hopefully this is the one
Love the harrelson.fm new domain. However, it seems to me that the only stable thing about your online presence is that you will keep changing aspects of your online presence (wasn’t it just a week ago when you said you’d always stay with sam@samharrelson.com). I love it, though. It’s quintessentially you. Don’t change a thing…except, of course, for your online presence.
Yep, you are completely right. I knew I had to provide a post with a rationale after such a doouble-take. However, I really want to make sure that all this “stuff” our family is generating has some staying power in a place that isn’t owned by the company du jour. We’ll see, but hopefully this is the one
Could you have chosen a more expensive TLD to commit to forever? .xxx maybe?
And of course you're banking on the fact that the Federated States of Micronesia won't fall to a Communist dictator who takes all the .fm sites and 301 redirect them to his pr0n network for traffic and SEO.
I kid. My head is still spinning from the latest blog change, but I like it.
So you're weaned from the Google. Are you moving off of Flickr? and Disqus? and, and …?
Thought about Micronesia… if things go south there, I can always just export my data and move over to harrelson.tv (until Tuvalu gets the bomb).
Flickr has always been more of either a) a photo dump for mobile pics or b) front end to a much wider collection of pics. So, I've got all those photos (and many more) stored up. I still love Flickr, so I'm trying to keep a presence there.
Disqus is another matter… thought about taking this plugin off and just using the default comment feature. However, the comments are saved on the server database even though they are being presented by Disqus. So, the same result is being achieved either way… I do like that folks can more easily 'sign in' with their OpenID or Twitter accts as well. What are your thoughts there? I know you've gone back and forth on Disqus.
For note taking, I have the awesome Notational Velocity hooked up to Simplenote on my iPhone and iPad (and Mac), so all my notes are synced to my storage and then onto Amazon S3.
Feed reading wise, I'm experimenting with Dave Winer's NewsRiver 2 again as well as Fever. For right now, I'm sticking with my (non-google sync) NetNewsWire, but I can't get access to my feeds on a mobile which isn't optimal.
Besides those four services (and Twitter, which is always a headache to ponder since we can't seem to get our act together with real federated micro-blogging or status.net instances), I think that's about the full gamut of 3rd party apps I was using. Maybe Instapaper? I don't think I'll move off of them until something better comes along (which isn't looking likely).
I guess there's a line between third party apps that store/make/use data like GMail or Google Calendar and Instapaper or Disqus or JungleDisk (or even Dropbox). Finding that DMZ line is going to be difficult, but should be fun
Thanks for your thoughts as always!
Could you have chosen a more expensive TLD to commit to forever? .xxx maybe?
And of course you’re banking on the fact that the Federated States of Micronesia won’t fall to a Communist dictator who takes all the .fm sites and 301 redirect them to his pr0n network for traffic and SEO.
I kid. My head is still spinning from the latest blog change, but I like it.
So you’re weaned from the Google. Are you moving off of Flickr? and Disqus? and, and …?
Thought about Micronesia… if things go south there, I can always just export my data and move over to harrelson.tv (until Tuvalu gets the bomb).
Flickr has always been more of either a) a photo dump for mobile pics or b) front end to a much wider collection of pics. So, I’ve got all those photos (and many more) stored up. I still love Flickr, so I’m trying to keep a presence there.
Disqus is another matter… thought about taking this plugin off and just using the default comment feature. However, the comments are saved on the server database even though they are being presented by Disqus. So, the same result is being achieved either way… I do like that folks can more easily ‘sign in’ with their OpenID or Twitter accts as well. What are your thoughts there? I know you’ve gone back and forth on Disqus.
For note taking, I have the awesome Notational Velocity hooked up to Simplenote on my iPhone and iPad (and Mac), so all my notes are synced to my storage and then onto Amazon S3.
Feed reading wise, I’m experimenting with Dave Winer’s NewsRiver 2 again as well as Fever. For right now, I’m sticking with my (non-google sync) NetNewsWire, but I can’t get access to my feeds on a mobile which isn’t optimal.
Besides those four services (and Twitter, which is always a headache to ponder since we can’t seem to get our act together with real federated micro-blogging or status.net instances), I think that’s about the full gamut of 3rd party apps I was using. Maybe Instapaper? I don’t think I’ll move off of them until something better comes along (which isn’t looking likely).
I guess there’s a line between third party apps that store/make/use data like GMail or Google Calendar and Instapaper or Disqus or JungleDisk (or even Dropbox). Finding that DMZ line is going to be difficult, but should be fun
Thanks for your thoughts as always!
Yeah, as I was replying I noted the distinction between a service that holds everything (like tumblr or posterous or gmail) and services that have great features worthy of use, but allow for easy redundancy.
But I decided to let it slide. We're on the same page though.
I can't believe you're using a desktop newsreader though. you must use reeder or something on your ipad, no?
Yeah, as I was replying I noted the distinction between a service that holds everything (like tumblr or posterous or gmail) and services that have great features worthy of use, but allow for easy redundancy.
But I decided to let it slide. We’re on the same page though.
I can’t believe you’re using a desktop newsreader though. you must use reeder or something on your ipad, no?
Disqus gone after I re-installed NoScript on Firefox
Yep, Reeder on the iPad. It’s a little too crashy on the iPhone, though.
I want to live Fever b/c it gives the type of sync that I need (I use
RSS and feed reading way too much).
Really?
At least turn on nested replies in the wordpress config.
Never mind, it appears to be on. Strange that didn’t that get preserved from Disqus.
Yeah, that should be working.
It is strange it wasn’t preserved, though.