Wednesday, May 19, 2004

so what's all this then?

Welcome to the current incarnation of Fuzzy's Logic. The homepage at fuzzyslogic.com acts are a central collection point for things that I post on various sites around the internet. These include extended blog style posts on any topic I feel the need to ramble at length about, short updates on what I'm currently doing or thinking, photos I upload to share with friends and family, snippets and links to interesting sites I stumble on as I cruise the internet.

The idea is that I'll pull in feeds from which ever sites and services are the current top of the pops. This way, when the next facebook / twitter / blogger / whatever site becomes the 'next big thing' I'll just set up a new input from that service and integrate it into this central site. Think of it as future proofing.

For those that are interested in the tech behind things, I'll let you know that the whole setup is centered around Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes is an awesome service which allows people to use a very visual editing system to pull in data via rss, xml, atom, etc feeds, manipulate them using nifty things like regex and munge them all into a single output feed. I then take the resulting single rss feed and run it through a fairly simple bit of php that I whipped up and the page at fuzzyslogic.com is the result.

This all allows me to use best of breed online services to create, manage and store my information, which frees me up from having to be a system admin and keep a whole raft of content management systems up to date.

Back in the dark ages of the internet, before anyone had come up with the ridiculous word 'blogosphere'; I blogged. I was a 19 year old (failing) university student who was addicted to Quake and the internet in general. I enjoyed manually updating html files with my thoughts regarding topics as broad as the day is long. Everything from how my latest duel on dm4 played out to funny anecdotes about things I witnessed while using public transport.

For a decade from 1996 to 2006 I tinkered away on my site and my posting frequency was roughly a bell curve. During the hey day of 2001 - 2002 my crappy site was getting over 1000 unique impressions a day and I loved it.

In 2007 I was burnt out. I'd questioned why I spent time posting random crap onto the internet. I pondered exactly who was reading what I was writting and why. I also grew very tied of having to maintain content management systems. During 2008 myspace and facebook took over the internet and a whole stack of people started to enjoy the same kind of socialising and networking which I'd loved back in the early 2000's. Of course they had it easy. I mean I used to have to walk 5 miles through the snow barefoot to upload hand edited html files!

Needless to say, I hated facebook. I laughed at it. Eventually I had to cave in and sign up though. I still hated it mind you.

2009 rolls around and twitter explodes onto the web and even more people get to experience blogging and socialising on the web. This time its even more dumbed down. 140 character limit on updates! This time I only held off a short while before caving in and joining the herd. I openly admit that it is cool. It is fun. It is a nifty tool. However, its just an instant messenger system.....

I quickly found that I missed being able to ramble in as many damn words as I pleased. So I dug up the password to the blogger account I'd created in 2004 while checking out the new kid on the block. Then got to work figuring out a way to bring everything together. This is the result!