I recently had our main family website server completely crash.  I use a cheap host and when things went south, they didn’t try terribly hard to fix things, the drive was dead and I had lost everything.  Of course, I am supposed to have backups.  I am supposed to know better.  And I did, of the photos on the site, but I hadn’t done a SQL backup of our photo metadata in a long time, and therefore was pretty much out of luck.

So I’ve decided that I really suck at being a sysop, at least for my personal data, and that I’d bet it all on the cloud instead.

The content on pottier.com was almost all photo galleries that Marc and I posted.  I’ve decided to move our photo hosting and metadata backups wholesale to Picasa.  Picasa not only has a great desktop client on both Windows and Mac, which does fantastic syncing onto their web, but they also have ridiculously cheap pricing.  My pictures and my email are really the only two things I care about every losing, so I want to have the full resolution photos backed up.  Not a problem with Picasa, and at 200Gigs of storage for $50/year, it’s a bargain.  The real key is that it isn’t just dumb storage for my photos, like any normal backup would, but instead also includes all the metadata for the photos, from exif tags, to location, to comments, descriptions and tags.  Good stuff.

The rest of the content on pottier.com was just my ramblings about one thing or another, and here I’ve decided to move to tumblr.  Even though I usually try to avoid sites with missing letters, I like their simple interface and very open API’s, and the way they classify content (links, posts, photos, etc) just kind of grocks with the way I want to ‘blog’.  Oh and it’s free, so even better.

Now Picasa and Tumblr are all well and good, but I miss having a homepage for our family, with what we’re up to and our own style and look and feel.  So part of the picking those two services was making sure they had nice and open APIs.  And they do, so I’ll be rebuilding the pottier.com website as very thin veneer over those two services.  No pictures will be saved on my server, instead I’ll be grabbing them from Picasa and styling them on the fly.  In a similar vain, I’ll wrap and post my tumblr posts, and maybe even some Facebook statuses.

The idea is not to own any of the data, because that’s a pain.  I’ve written interfaces for managing photos before, and I’m done with it.  It is far easier to use Picasa on my mac, or even the web UI to edit and post.  Same with tumblr.  Most of the work of creating a custom website is those admin tasks, managing your content, letting you edit and post what you want.  I’m choosing to trust the cloud, and to use their interfaces for content creation, but package their product into my own site.

We’ll see how it goes, but so far I am loving the simplicity.  Oh, and I’ll be doing it all in Django, as I’m starting to appreciate Python more and more for this kind of work.  So far Django seems fantastically organized, and the pre-built Python libs for accessing Picasa and Tumblr sure don’t hurt either.