Marshall has it right…

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist » Why I’ll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus: “Rather than chasing people around from one platform to another, where they prefer to spend their time, I’m going to sit right here on a site I own and wait for the future to become interoperable with me!”

Head over and read the whole piece if you’re a Google+ (or any social networking… which is all of us these days) user. It’s worth your time as you ponder where to put your content

That’s the major reason I’ve decided to really focus on keeping this space as the hub of my own digital content. I love Twitter, I grudgingly use Facebook and I’m becoming a believer in Google+, but at the end of the day, this is my home.

In 2009, I decided on “Bringing it All Back Home” to this space/server…

So, I’ve been streamlining and pulling things together to reflect a little web content creation maturity. My criteria were; 1) apps/data have to provide a mobile access point 2) apps/data had to have their root on the samharrelson.com domain and 3) backups, backups, backups and 4) data portability or an export function (even RSS or XML works for me).

That went well for a little while and I gave an update last June with “Bringing it All Back Home Revisited“…

I love the social web and the incredible apps that have come along these last five years. However, I also love my independence. There’s something to the “Coral Reef” idea that Dave Winer spoke of in regard to Twitter a couple of years back that appeals to me in terms of net identity. I like to think of samharrelson.com as my digital coral reef that provides the biosphere and anchor for all the species of web apps that make up my online content ecosystem. That’s the hope here.

So, in what has become an annual state of “Back Home,” here’s where I stand on making this my digital hub (go read the other two posts to see the transition)…

- First I was on LivingDot then a short stint on BlueHost then I wised up and moved over to MediaTemple. I’ve had absolutely no problem with the service or hosting and it’s a reasonable amount to pay (more expensive than the others but worth it in my book) per month for solid service and availability.

- My sam@samharrelson.com email now flows through that MediaTemple account and I access it via POP on my Macbook Pro’s Mail.app and keep a copy backed up via a Time Capsule as well as offsite storage on Amazon’s S3 service. I also use the amazing MailSteward for a MySQL database of searching through all that mail as well as MSGFiler for quick labeling of incoming messages to keep my inbox clean. I love the setup.

- My documents are treated the same as I’ve been treating them since last year (backed up Pages and Keynote on this server and 3rd party storage) but with the iCloud transition coming to Mac OSX, I’m incredibly excited to move away from solutions like Dropbox (which I’ve recently canceled anyway). So, iCloud is a game changer for me.

- My web calendar is an installed version of WebCalendar that isn’t the prettiest thing in the world but I do enjoy using because it is here and not privy to an advertising company. I use iCal on my Macs and iOS devices to sync.

- The all important ToDo list is handled still by OmniFocus. The iPhone app and iPad app make this the killer feature of the iOS experience for me.

- I’m using Yojimbo more and more for bookmarks and archiving links/notes, but I do wish there were something of an iPhone app to compliment the iPad app since I don’t have a 3G iPad and there are instances every now and then when I need a quick access point to a note or bookmark stored in Yojimbo. Otherwise, it’s all backed up, encrypted and safe.

- Notes wise, I’m still using a combo of SimpleNote and the native Notes app on iOS (since that’s where most of my note taking takes place) that syncs up with my Macs. However, I’ve been using old fashioned Moleskine and pen a great deal lately. Still working on that one…

- Music wise, I’m a crazy combination of my own iTunes library and Rdio (love) with a little Pandora thrown in every now and then. However, iCloud has re-done how I thought of iTunes and now I’m excited about having music available across the board through that service rather than something like Rdio (even though that will be hard to give up).

- I’m still using Fever for my RSS reader. RSS is very much alive for me and Fever is a great self-install way to make sure that I’m staying on top of things. the iPhone and iPad web apps are killer and do the trick. I haven’t thought of going back to Google Reader since installing Fever almost two years ago.

- Textmate, MarsEdit, Skype, and CloudApp make up the rest of my daily flow.

So, there you go. That’s the third State of Bringing it All Back Home to my little coral reef.

Marshall is right… DIY your own web-existence and don’t rely on corporations to provide you with the essential connections of emails, docs, calendars etc that aren’t based around you as an individual but rather seek to sell you as a commodity based on your attention. You’re better than that.