Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Time to Rethink fuzzyslogic.com

I built the current version of fuzzyslogic.com with the idea that it had to be able to handle the fact that internet services come and go. I made it simple for me to switch from one hosting provider to another and be able to add and remove the collection of content from sites and services as they came and went. These features have worked wonderfully; when I moved to the US I switched from an Australian host to an American one, I've switched from using wordpress to blogger for my blogging service, I've switched from spurl to diigo for online bookmarking.... etc.

However, there was one single point of failure in all this; Yahoo Pipes. It is an amazing system that not many people have heard about, basically it allowed me to feed in a stack of rss feeds, munge them all together and spit out data in a format of my choice.

Now Pipes being shut down.

At the end of August 2015 the back end system for fuzzyslogic.com will stop pulling in new content because Pipes won't be there to do it.

I'm forced to consider what to do. Since I built all of this around Pipes I've learned to love a python library called Beautiful Soup, which I could use to build a custom system to replace what I was using Pipes for.

However, I have to stop and consider the fact that I haven't really been making much use of fuzzyslogic.com anyway. Combine that with the fact that no one else actually visits the site anyway..... then maybe I don't really need to invest any effort in keeping it running.

I could kill off the host all together and shift the domain name over be hosted by my registra or simply point it directly at the fuzzy's logic blogger site. This would be saving me US$5 a month and never having to worry about updating a web server or even monitoring one.

The only other things I've been using the web server host for is running my RSS aggregator which I can replace with another service such as inoreader.com, running an IRC bot in a channel which has recently been replaced by our group using Slack and storing random files (which I can use any number of cloud storage places for).

I've got a little over a month to think about it.... but at this stage I'm leaning towards shutting down the web server.