Categories
Digital Archive

A Digital Archive

I wonder how many other people out there want this too? I have, on my various computers:

  • Email, mostly complete, since about 1993 (ish)
  • My music collection
  • A few years of photo albums
What I’d like is a way to store that lot, in a vendor-neutral fashion, and then access it from most IP connected spots in the world. It’s the vendor-neutral bit that seems to be hard. My music is all hidden in iTunes, and for a long while, my email was trapped in Outlook.

However, this weekend was a practical first step. I brought up an IMAP server, and started transferring all those archives (over 10 years) to it.

I copped out – having tried to run an OpenBSD server, and hack around on Mac OS X client – I just bought Mac OS X Server, and installed it on my desktop. About 10 minutes later, the server was running. When Apple make it easy, boy do they make it easy! I can access the archive via SSL/IMAP or SSL/HTTP, so most internet connections can reach it. By far the best is my Mac client – spotlight for over 10 years of email is awesome!

Categories
McAleely.com

A Start of Something

Well, I’ve been wanting a blog for a while. I’ve been following several for a number of years, and there is definitely a budding writer in me (my English teachers would probably be surprised!).I had a go at editthispage, and have been evaluating a few packages on mcaleely.com, on and off, for a couple of years. WordPress 1.x, plog (now something else), and greymatter were all hosted here at one time or another.I’ve been looking for two features:

  • Hosted at my own domain
  • High quality URLs

I don’t like paying for URLs I can’t control. Either because they are hosted at someone else’s domain, or because some programmer somewhere thinks their time is more important than mine. URLs in the form of post.php?id=999 might have been a necessary step, but the very earliest web style guides recommended making URLs human readable, and I rather like that myself. WordPress 2.0.1 seems to have finally satisfied these features, and its free!

Categories
Miscellanea

Hello World

My first post to a live Blog!