time for something new

it has been over two years since yahoo! bought blo.gs and almost a year since the public-facing side of the site stopped updating.

i mentioned earlier that i stopped using blo.gs, so i figure it is about time to actually turn what i have done for myself into a full-fledged website and let others use it. it was john gruber’s mention of how he uses rss feeds that pushed me over the edge.

it will not be the same as blo.gs. blo.gs was sort of infrastructural, but this new thing will be focused on telling you what’s new.

it will be built more around polling than pinging, at least for now. (maybe if it is wildly successful, dealing with the cost of all the ping spam will be worth the benefit of not having to poll.)

it will make use of the amazon web services. maybe not at first, but eventually it will have to scale and i can already see how aws would make that easier.

it will probably be built in python. why not? it gives me an excuse to learn something new.

one thing i have not figured out is what will be free. there will probably be paid accounts of some kind. and free accounts of some kind. the current expenses are $30 in domain names and $20/month in hosting (shared by this site and my other projects, which offset about $5/month). i am not willing to eat much more than that. (yeah, i am still quite the cheeseparer.)

i even have a cute web 2.0 name for it. but i will wait until there is something to show before spilling the beans on that.

and i am not quitting my day job, so it may be weeks or months before there is anything to show.