The Chicken Coop

A lot of people knew this anyway, especially Rod*, but I’ve only really jumped on the bandwagon recently – since I got the Mac, actually.

*not that post specificly, I just liked it. Here’s his full google category.

With us going overseas, we’ve had to decouple from our server. We’ve had a server for as long as we’ve been together (and there was one in the Tui Rd Apartments (BMF.mahuika.local big grin) before that). It has company docs on it, software, media, movies, music (lots of music), backups, and has run Exchange, Sharepoint, AfterMail/Archive Manager, our blogs, and pretty much anything else we needed. The only thing it needed was an reliable, always on internet connection. (Thanks, TelstraClear – cable’s been exactly that, pity about your call center )

But with going overseas, there is no way I’m lugging around a 25+kg server – we dont need it, for one thing! So I’ve been looking for alternatives for everything.

Some of it is not going to move over at all – sharepoint lists (WSS) for example, will be exported to excel or google docs, put on disk and then uninstalled (we dont use it much anyway). Our blogs and websites have moved painlessly to webhost4life. Exchange was decommissioned (port 25 closed) a month or so ago, and we moved to Google Apps (gmail for domains) - again, totally painlessly. We’ve been using flickr for ages for photo’s (tho not even close to all of them – Leonie can take 600 photos (1GB) in a weekend without really trying)

All the email in our archive (135,000 messages) has been exported to .eml files (with the email exporter in Archive Manager) and then imported into a special GAFD account (saldy over the 2GB limit, so I have to pay…. oh, well. It’s quite cheap at $50/yr). Everything is off the server except for media and company files (and it’ll get the Windows Home Server treatment as soon as we move out of the house and I have time to reinstall the OS)

Can you see where this is going?

So the last thing I’ve been looking for to finish my “personal stuff” move to the Mac is a good RSS reader. My current one on the PC is FeedDemon, and if they had a 1:1 port to the Mac, I’d be there in a shot – it’s by far the best reader for me on the market. (They do a mac “version” – netnewswire - but it doesn’t appear to have the newspaper view that FD has…. which is exactly how I read all my feeds). I tried a few others, and they were the same – all of them had the three-pane, outlook/email view of things. Not what I wanted.

Enter Damon and his recommendation for Google Reader.

It’s not perfect, but it’s very close for what I use it for. I can read by group (au-bloggers for eg), it imported my opml in about 30 seconds (250+ feeds), and it’s quick enough for general use.

All up, I’m impressed. I’m wondering if I should be worried about having so much of my “life” on the google-plex – but if MS or another large company (apple, maybe ibm) offered the same, I’d consider using them, too.

I think the general Software as a Service model – especially if your application is very international-able – is super compelling. It’s easy to deploy, easy and cheap to promote, browsers (IE6/7, FF2 especially) are fully featured and stable enough to do real work in, as well as being cross platform, and there are a lot of good technologies around making it possible for mortals – not just guru’s the likes of Koz or Ben Nolan – to do good stuff. Think ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX, MonoRail, RoR, Spring et al in the Java space, and toolkits like prototype for ajax stuff.

I can now see why San Francisco seams to be so totally web 2.0 focused. Again, something to investigate (hi Rich!)

About the only other thing, for our day-to-day company stuff, would be google accounting. oops, thats taken – it’s called Xero . (I had to link it back to Rod somehow!!)