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The River No Longer Runs Through It
In October of Last Year I wrote :
For a while now, I have been building a parallel set of thoughts which now has a permanent home here. It is a set of thoughts that live between the 140 characters of Twitter and this space which I am transitioning to more of an original thought / essay space.
This is to report that the experiment (for that is now what I realise it was) has come to an end. I have enjoyed learning how the software works. I think what Dave Winer is trying to do is awesome - and I will continue to support his thoughts - but for me - time to refocus back to my prime home … here.
My main reasoning is that while I believe it is essential to have your own space that is yours. A space that you can easily manage and does all that you need it to do. It also needs to be free of the control of sites liek Medium, Facebook and all the other free service out there that can change on a whim. Yes, you do need those spaces to act as your distribution arm. As such, simple integration to those social spaces is essential.
I originally tried Dave’s software on his server. I liked it and moved to cloud at cost for hosting. Within a month I was looking to move on. There is an old adage …
Price is what you pay, quality is what you get.
I couldn’t fault the price - but the quality, level of support, reliability … you name it … was close to no existent. My river servers now reside at a much more reliable service - Digital Ocean - who are just great. I couldn’t recommend them more.
So - what’s the beef? Well, I think the bottom line is that Dave’s software is great - but not sure people are understanding it - and recognizing why it is different to Other services). As a result, they do not seem to be adopting it. If it doesn’t get adopted - it is hard to get help when things go wrong. And when you have the technological skills of a kangaroo - help is needed .. a lot.
There is a group of 1999 users - and the support of each other in the groups is great - but we all get busy. Dave only wants to help if he knows it is an issue with his software - as I have said before - I don’t have the technical chops to give him what he needs.
So - I have hit problems that I know can be fixed - but I simply don’t understand it all well enough.
That said - I believe that I have been one of the most prolific contributors and users of his software.. I just did a back up and found that I have posted 478 times since I started on this journey - so yes there is a lot of words contributed. And - if I could get all of this stuff working - I think I could be a great advocate and user. But I need more than a chronological record - I want to be able to easily search, I want tighter social connections, I want to the RSS to work - and all of these things are possible - with more technical knowledge … but I don’t have that time - so onwards. My tech friends that help me in other places dont know 1999. My 1999 tech friends are all very busy. So - bottom line. Outta here.
The River will stay in place for posterity - and can be found here.
But from now on - this is the single central place to find the rants of yours truly. My first post in here was September, 2010 - more will follow.