Facebook username landgrab disproves ‘normal people don’t understand URIs’
Being a dork, I planned to stay up till 5am GMT to grab my vanity Facebook URI. I fell asleep and woke up at 6:30am GMT. I tried to get a URI and they were all gone. And there’s no way I’m having something with a number on the end - I am not a number, I am a person! (etc.). I settled on facebook.com/tommorris.org.
While I’m slightly pissy about staying up most of the night then falling asleep and missing out on ‘tommorris’, what this landgrab vividly disproves is the long-held anti-OpenID sentiment that users don’t understand URIs.
You tell a bunch of Facebook users that they can get themselves a custom username which forms a URI they can hand out to their friends and they just lap that shit up. They understand it from MySpace, Twitter, LiveJournal, Flickr and plenty of other social networks. Can we stop this bullshit right now? If you find some jumped up user experience designer telling you that the proleteriat don’t understand using URIs for identity, point them to this morning’s landgrab on Facebook’s URI space.
Right, I’m going back to bed. I do hope this is all in a good cause: it’d be quite nice if Facebook were to roll out OpenID and get rid of this proprietary Friend Connect garbage.
Road to tommorris.org reborn: Help me find cheap and awesome VPS
I finally decided last night that I’m personally deprecating PHP. I’m not writing that shit anymore. I’ve had enough. The fact that (“false” == 0) returns true, (false == 0) returns true and (“false” == false) returns false offends the logician in me. Identity should fucking well be transitive. If a is the same as b, and b is the same as c, then a is the same as c. PHP is supposed to be easy for new users. But this scares the living daylights out of me. People actually use this?!
Fortunately, I know enough about Linux, Ruby, Rails and Apache to move. In the next three to six months, I’m going to be building replacement bits for my site. I’m planning to move my blog over to Rails, which shouldn’t be too much work. I’m planning to do some things in tommorris.org reborn (I was tempted to put “2.0”, but that would have made me a flaming hypocrite of the worst kind) that will both make it suck a lot less (including making the design prettier but still not something that would offend the sensibilities of Jakob Nielsen - but then, I do spend all day staring at white monospaced Inconsolata against a black background, so what the fuck do I know about aesthetics?) and to add lots of fancy stuff. On the top of my list: absolutely everything is going to be completely microformatted and RDF’d to death. Gotta practice what I preach. I’m planning to add lots of fancy social faff, all done with open standards. That means HTML, CSS, JavaScript, RDF, XML, RSS/Atom, JSON, KML, OPML, OpenID and so on.
And I’m planning to integrate all the other external services I use far closer: Twitter/identi.ca, Delicious, last.fm, Flickr, FireEagle, GoodReads and Huffduffer. And tying those together with Linked Data providers including OpenLibrary (if they get their shit together and fix their RDF/XML output), LIBRIS, Dbpedia, BBC Programmes, dbtune and so on. Also practicing what I preach. Hopefully also using my servers to keep backups of all my own shit, so that when one of these external services turns evil or disappears off the face of the planet, I can sit back and relax about how all my stuff still works. The Internet doesn’t exist so we can all be dependent children on third-party services.
I’ve been meaning to do all that stuff for a long time, but haven’t because PHP is suck a pain in the ass. But doing this kind of thing with Rails and other Rack-based Ruby web stuff seems a lot more pleasant. I have a few things I am still not wild about with Ruby: it’s less than optimal support of Unicode is the primary one. I’ve played around a lot with JRuby, and love being able to pull up a jirb shell and bash away at Java libraries and JARs.
The first step though is hosting. I’m not doing shared hosting. Even though it’s a recession, I’ve decided I’d much rather use a VPS provider - either a traditional one or a ‘cloud’ one (I still loathe the term cloud - cloud hosting is, as far as I can tell, just pay-as-you-go, easy-to-scale VPS).
For commercial work, I tend to use and recommend Linode. I’m sure the Linode 360 plan would be more than enough for a personal site. I’ve also been looking at Mosso - the 256Mb plan costing USD 0.015 plus transfer seems like a great deal. It’s like EC2 for the rest of us. I may just put it on a Linode I use for commercial work for development and then shunt it over on to it’s own Linode when it’s ready. All I need is Debian, Apache 2, Phusion Passenger, Rails, about ten thousand rubygems and possibly Postgres. Anyone got any suggestions for cheap and awesome VPS hosting in US or EU?
