After making the snap decision to start maintaining a journal-thingy (well, non-snap, I did have a little inspiration :-) , I’ve decided that this text-file-on-my-desktop thing just won’t cut it. And I don’t trust those millions of free-online-journal sites with my ever-so-valuable Intellectual Property. (Business model, what’s that? Where’s my data, you going-out-of-business bastards! I WANT MY DATA!) Watch me over-engineer something completely excessive using PHP, mySQL and various other buzzwords. Mmm, full-grown relational database to handle what should should probably stay in a text file, yeah.<\/p>\n
It will begin with an update-from-anywhere script to store my crap into a database on my server (yes, I have my own server. I am a nerd. Deal with it.)<\/p>\n
From there I will probably decide there are entries I don’t want people to read. Or only certain people to read. Or entries certain people should NOT read. Or entries I fully intend for a certain person to read while under the impression that they shouldn’t be able to, but they’ve somehow managed to sneak a peek at it anyway. I’m sure there are instances where that would come in handy, but I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head. It might be useful for burning people who like to snoop. Speaking of which, I’ll be wanting records of when any known snoops are reading the damn thing. (e.g. we broke up a year ago, get out of my life already bee-yatch!) All of this calls for a completely over-the-top access-control and authentification scheme. Yeah, I know, authentification isn’t a word. Or is it? Well, it is now.<\/p>\n
And since this will be an online thing, there is of course the issue of ‘why is this crap online?’ for millions of random internet people who don’t (and probably shouldn’t) give Shit One about it. Maybe I should make it so I can tag each entry with an attribute, e.g. “worth reading” vs. “meaningless minutae of my personal life”, so people don’t actually have to wade thru that stuff (who wants to read the day-to-day life history of a non-famous person they haven’t met?) Once I’m doing that, I may as well have a ‘Rant’ attribute as well, since I do a LOT of that, and there are people out there who love a good rant and will doubtless want to filter all non-rant entries.<\/p>\n
Of course, some percentage of rants will involve cruddy companies and\/or products, and I’ll likely end up getting sued or something. (Hey…you company snooping bastards HACKED INTO my personal over-engineered online diary? For Shame, I should sue…)<\/p>\n