Dean Landolt

I was just putting the final touches on what, in my own mind at least, was a pretty well thought out argument against this myth of “information overload” and why I’m about fed up hearing about how hard it is to find quality information online when I was bitten by the irony bug. Here I am defending all things web, and a shoddy little local Kansas newspaper PDF takes down my Firefox, taking my Vox post with it (how abouts an autosave feature, SixApart?!)

I guess I can’t lay the blame squarely on Vox — that’s what I get for keeping about 25 tabs open in FF at a time; not installing the Foxit and relying on the crapware that is Adobe’s PDF plugin; doing all this in XP on my laptop instead of on my much more reliable Ubuntu desktop even though it was sitting right there; hell, just not saving my work regularly. None the less, it’s more fun to blame somebody, so that might as well be…

Web apps!

Goddamn web apps. Why can’t they figure out local storage? Why is my increasingly unreliable wireless connection my only tether to my important data?

Of course, I don’t really mean it. It’s not web apps that are the problem — even with current technologies and techniques, it shouldn’t be too hard to store important data in the local cache — even make the application work (albeit crippled) offline.

It’s current web apps and lazy developers. Most Google apps still function when disconnected. Zimbra’s doing some interesting things with Zimbra Desktop, bringing full-functionality to offline web apps. There’s some really great Rails development going on in this space with Slingshot. Adobe’s making big waves with their impending Apollo (but let’s be serious, if it’s half as bloated as their other products, it’s a non-starter — hopefully the old Macromedia team’s built a fortress around their SvN to keep Adobe out!). Open source web apps and virtualization may eventually lead to even better ways to make web-based applications all the more usable by allowing local, virtualized failover…

I’m an unapologetic web2.0 fanboy. I believe almost religiously applications are far too bloated, both on the desktop and the web. For some applications, I can live without offline use, but there are a number of reasons why I’d like my data locally cached. As the features keep rolling in, the stability of my browser and its buggy JavaScript interpreter plummet. This makes local storage all the more important, even a showstopper for some tools — including Vox…

So now I’m in the market for blogging software — preferably something clean and easy that I can also host inside a virtual machine locally! Any ideas?

Update: Out of the box WordPress indeed has autosave. Regarding offline storage — a few days after I penned this, 37Signals stirred up a shitstorm with their you’re-not-on-a-fucking-plane post — a little trollish, but worth a read…

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This entry was posted Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Software. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.