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What is this site?
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This site is a personal url redirecting service that is used by one person. I'm Adam Curry and this is my own personal cloud. More accurately, this is one piece of my personal cloud (service) and part of an ongoing project to migrate my dependance off of centralized cloud based services.
Of course the concept of the cloud isn't all that bad. Distributed storage is important in an age and industry where virality can bring a single server to it's knees and bandwidth and maintenance become vastly cheaper when done at scale.
But the real issue at hand is when services built on top of these centralized services 'go away'. Of course having backups and a strategy for rebuilding the stored content and organization, the public (and private!) links to this content pretty much goes poof when you don't have personal control over the url that was used to publish their existence.
That's what this site is for. I intend to never again publish a link to any content without it running through my personal service. Should a storage 'bin' beyond my control disappear, all I would need to do is implement my strategy, which also consists of remapping the url's in my own database to the new 'bin'. That way the pointers I created and that are indexed and copied web-wide will remain intact.
As I've posted in the past:
Hyperlinks is the currency of the internet
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The Backstory
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drop.io: This is where it all started for me:
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I will be writing the story up here.
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Links
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This site is using the outstanding open source software yourls
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Updates
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I will be updating this page over the next days, weeks, months and perhaps even years.
It will be a living document.
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A copy of this document in opml format is also available and will be updated simultaneously
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My current work
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Thursday, December 16, 2010 5:37:34 PM
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It's been over a month now since I've updated my progress here. And since I just linked (story at curry.com) to this page in the wake of Delicious being shut down by Yahoo, here's my recent experiences living off of the cloud.
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First of all, I'd like to reiterate that the cloud has nothing to do with distributed storage for serving up content. This type of service is a very good thing, and as long as you own the links, and the DNS associated with those links, you can always switch to another provider without breakage.
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My URL redirection has been going like a champ. no complaints, no outages and efficient to use.
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The in-house mail server has been a dream, although I will say that I had a couple major outages on the Time Warner CAble Internet service, which of course immediately also made the email server unavailable. I have a backup server at a outside provider, that automatically takes over (through a secondary mx record) when this happens. I have my email client(s) configured to switch to this server when needed, allowing me to continue with email (albeit not as secure) when that situation occurs.
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I've noticed one other minor annoyance, now that I have PGP encryption a lot of people insist on sending all their email to me encrypted, which I cannot view anywhere else than on my MacBookPro (no pgp client exists for the iPhone) making it a bit of an extra chore. Unnecessarily so if the email really isn't of a confidential nature.
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All in all, a great experience, and equally if not faster and more efficient that using GMail
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Email Migration
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I've successfully moved all my email off of the cloud and it is now about as secure as I can get it. I am now using a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard OSX server for email, and have it attached to my cable modem connection. Luckily I've dealt with mx records and other DNS related things in the past, so I was able to get 'incoming' email setup without much effort. Outgoing is another matter. I do not have a 'business account' with Time Warner Cable, and even though they do allow the consumer grade version to send outbound SMTP traffic on the normal ports (25 etc) a lot of mail services reject the entire TWC block, and I also do not have a PTR, or reverse dns lookup. I have entrusted my outbound relay to dyndns.org, who I believe to be a pretty straight forward outfit. Hopefully they aren't storing any copies anywhere.
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Just to be sure though, I have installed GNUPG on my mac's Mail.app. It's gotten pretty easy to set this up, compared to the last time I was trying this out, which was 1997, according to the public keys I published on the open key server sites :)
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In order to replicate the speed and ease GMail provided, the OSX Server solution is pretty good, as it allows for server side email rules. Since I'm the only user on my mail server, the IMAP based searches are pretty fast.
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As an additional archival and search mechanism, I'm now using Mail Steward, which imports your archived email into a SQL based database. I've already had several scenarios where this found a veritable needle in a haystack of emails. Although certainly a far cry from the ease that GMail provided me with searches in the exiting web interface (I know have to open up a separate application to perform a complex search) the amount of times I actually need to do this warrant the extra steps.
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But the REAL timesaver, is a little Mail.app plug-in that I purchased, MsgFilr. This utility allows you to assign a keyboard command (mine is applekey-L) and then you type the first couple of characters fo the mailbox you want to store the message in and hit return. This is the equivalent of GMail's 'labels' feature and allows me to quickly file a message without lifting my hands from the keyboard to drag and drop the message with the mouse. A HUGE timesaver.
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Monday, November 8, 2010 1:16:28 PM
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The most time intensive task I'll be undertaking in my quest to move off the cloud is migrating all of my email and mail services in-house. I've been using GMail for several years and hate to give it up for two main reasons:
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Excellent search capabilities
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Mail Steward allows import of Mail.app stored messages into a MySql database and has amazing search capabilities.
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ATMail stores all data in a SQL database and claims quick search and sorting
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Keyboard navigation
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There are several work-arounds and plug-ins for the mail.app that provide keyboard shortcuts above what is already built in.
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ATMail has a snazzy interface on their roadmap, but not apparently released at this time yet
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I'm looking at good alternatives, which will consist of the mail server itself, and the webmail client, or mail app that I will use to replace the gmail interface. Both have their own challenges.
But the first step is to get all copies of my mail locally. Since I have almost 25 Gigs of email stored on google, this will be a multi day task, and have started by replicating everything in Mail.app through the GMail Google Apps IMAP interface. This is slow, but reliable as far as I know.
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Last updated: Thursday, December 16, 2010 5:47:07 PM
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