Out with the old, in with the new
This week I finally sat down and tackled a project I’ve been meaning to get to for at least 6 months. The project was to revamp my blog and create a site which would essentially become the hub of my online presence. A single place where someone could find out about me, connect with me, and get to know me. In other words, a lifestreaming site.
The idea first started when I registered a domain of my own, digitalcraig.me. I started by making it simply a redirect to a storytlr site, a hosted lifestreaming solution. I kept my blog over at wordpress.com and the storytlr site would still pull in posts from the blog so that everything would be centralized, right? In reality, it didn’t feel centralized at all. WordPress.com and storytlr.com were just other sites that I joined that provided a service, nothing different that Twitter or Facebook or Flickr. I still felt I needed something of my own before it would truly be centralized.
This point hit home even further when storytlr announced that they were shutting down operations on December 31, 2009. Although I give them credit for shutting down in an orderly fashion and providing tools to export my data, I was still a little shocked to realize that 3rd parties owned every piece of my online presence. If all of them suddenly shutdown or decided to sell all of my personal information (I’m looking at you suspiciously, Facebook) then there isn’t anything I can really do about it.
So, here we are. A brand new blog on my very own webhost under my very own domain. As an added bonus, this page contains links to my profiles on over a dozen other sites. If you want to know more about me, look me up on any of those sites. If you want to know what I’m currently reading, find me on Goodreads. If you want to know what news I’m reading, find my Google Reader shared items. If you want to know what short witty comments I’m making on Twitter, you’ll find a link to me there.
You may also notice a link at the top of the page called “Lifestream”. This is the page that aggregates all of my activity on those other sites into a timeline on a single page. It lists every Twitter post, every movie I rented at Netflix, every blog entry I write, and every news item I share.
On the other hand, you may not care. Either you don’t know who I am and don’t care or you simply aren’t into the minutiae of my life. That’s fine, it’s there if you’re interested and you can ignore it if you’re not.