drain bump
We have a drawer at the house we call the “oh, shit” drawer. It has chargers for long-discontinued phones (hey, Nokia might start making the 2120 again!). It has enough paperclips and safety pins to melt down and make, say, a medium-sized bicycle. It’s got crap I don’t even know what to call.
Welcome to the verbal equivalent of that drawer. What’s left to write about here? Flash-pan, off-the-cuff insights go on Twitter. Code goes on GitHub, thanks to hg-git. Prose, if I’m excited enough to feel compelled to type it in no matter where I am, gets e-mailed straight to Posterous. And if I’m not excited to write it? Well, you’re lookin’ at it, bub.
Weird that just a couple of years ago, a domain was a one-stop shop to put everything you cared about: reading, writing, code, life, photos, essays, quips, everything. Now, our identities are so sharded. (No, not sharted.) Not a bad thing, necessarily. A bunch of people I know get way more eyeballs on their tweets than they ever did on their blog posts. And one gal uses the Internet as kind of a fault-embracing distributed backup of her brain. Why worry about meticulously finding room on your computer to put stuff, the reasoning goes, when you can blast it out into the ether?
Tempting.
Still, though, the retro-2000s curmudgeon in me says that www.yourname.com is better than facebook.com/yourname plus twitter.com/yourname. Not that these are mutually exclusive, but realistically, how much time do we all have to be de-facto system admins of ten different websites? In our spare time, no less?
And what’s left to put on your own domain when you’ve already said everything elsewhere? Just an aggregation of crud that lives elsewhere?
I dunno, maybe I’m overthinking this (shocker!). Probably best just to let all those other (a)venues be breeding grounds for ideas, and use good ol’ Ctrl-C plus Ctrl-V to bring the greatest hits into one place.
Not that there won’t always be that little monkey voice saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little script to tie this all together? C’mon, let’s fire up Emacs….”