Drupal

Everyone agrees that changing your URL, especially when you have a decent, steady stream of visitors reading your crap, is a bad idea. Any benefit that you would get from a shiny new poignant URL would be offset by the droves of people who don't want to be bothered to read you somewhere else (especially if - like me - you're not terribly well-written), or add Yet Another XML Feed (tm) to their aggregator.

I thought I was going to drop stevesgallery.com, but I'm not. If I'm a wacko for feeling nostalgic about something as ethereal as a domain name, so be it. stevesgallery.com will probably devolve into a sandbox to throw out thoughts and feelings at irregular intervals. I'll keep it closely tied to monolithic social hosting services like flickr, blip, youtube and del.icio.us, because I'm trying to accomplish the exact opposite of relying on that very infrastructure for my content. And we all know that you can't slay the beast unless you understand it.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, mainly about the centralization and ownership of data. My good friend Boris sparked up a great conversation about this a couple months ago. Namely, I question the reasons behind many of these services unwillingness to develop a standard import / export strategy for when users want to jump ship. I'm not paying Flickr to host my photos, I'm paying them to be part of their community. However, in order to get my images back under my control, I have to resort to a hack.

All things considered, I've been trying to create a system which lets me publish my content just as easily as I would with these hosted services, but allow me to nevertheless retain nearly-full control of my own information. Sure, it's still "hosted" somewhere else, but that "somewhere" isn't as bloated as some other entities that we rely on. A catch-22 I have in the work I do is trying to come to terms with the fact that some of the tools I rely on were built by runaway capitalism, which is also what I'm trying to subvert. It's hypocritical of me to keep doing what I'm doing while remaining subservient to Apple, Yahoo et al. It's also ridiculous for me (and for you...) to run around praising the merits of open-source technology while toting an Apple Powerbook or sitting at a Windows desktop.

With that in mind, I have set up a sort of hybrid CMS / Aggregator at my new URL, stevenmansour.com. I'm tweaking it piece by piece so that it's almost as easy to use as the sum of all the other services I've been using this far, with the big question mark being, "How can I encourage the same level of community interaction without being a part of the actual "community" on those big content sharing services"?

In short, this is all just a big fun science experiment: I'm going to continue to "allow" one part of my content, through stevesgallery.com, flickr, del.icio.us, youtube and blip.tv to float out there on their own, acting as a catalyst for these companies (basically "Yahoo!" ;) ) to continue to profit from them. On the other hand, stevenmansour.com will not rely on any of these services, instead allowing me complete freedom to access and manipulate my data however I wish - directly, without going through some convoluted API.

So, errr, run, don't walk! There are already some juicy video clips, a couple of blog posts, and my very first podcast! You can hop between content categories (video, pics, podcasts, blog entries, etc) and pick and choose the RSS / Atom feed you subscribe to based on what you want to see / which application you use to aggregate, or you can just subscribe to the site's global feed. Either way, it's all goodness!