Archive of December 2005
Dev tool switchup
So, I've pretty much recently gone from working on an almost entirely MS based dev evironment to one based completely on open-source tools, and I gotta say, I can't believe I ever worked any other way. Using SVN as a version control system has by far the best of the shift. I can see how the copy-modify-merge system is much better than a lock-modify-unlock system, but I guess it takes a little more brain power to see how merges need to properly occur. Still, in my former role as the Human Content Management System™, it would have been absolutely essential, and quite frankly could have freed up about 70% of the time I spent trying to manually merge my trunk changes into the more frequently updated live branch, and vice-versa.
What I should have done, if I had the foresight, was manage my own trunk and branch builds on my local machine and merged there, then checked into VSS. I could have saved myself a buttload of trouble and come off looking like a fucking champ. Ahh, if only I had known.
Changes are a-comin'
I think I am going to completely shift the focus of this site. Right now, it's a weblog surrounded by feeds. Seeing as how the weblog is by far the most infrequently updated (and probably least interesting) part of the page, it seems like it would be smarter to flip it, giving the feeds more space to allow excerpts and reduce the weblog to a smaller section. Afterall, with all the services I use on a daily basis, the last thing I need is another blog (I have 8, at last count). What I need is a place to organize all my online habits that is centralized and service-independent. I don't need another service wanting to be my "digital lifestyle aggregator". Why have someone else to do that for me? What I need to do is take what I already have and make it what it really needs to be: the one stop Tom shop. Isn't that what homepages were for to begin with?
UPDATE: Wow, take a look at Suprglu (here's mine). Pretty much just what I was talking about, but rolled into a service. If you had more control over the layout, then it would be great. I could still totally see a suite of apps rolled into a server-side script for installation on your own site as being a killer-app, though.