From out of the fog

This is the next iteration of the transientem project, although no one knows that yet. There's a Read Me; I suggest you read at least the opening list. In this inaugural entry, I'm going to elaborate a bit on some things there. I assure you that we'll resume normal programming starting with the next entry. Well, whatever passes for normal around these parts.

A new wheel of inferior quality

Speaking of programming, the site infrastructure has been an exercise in it. Ever since Google App Engine came out, I've been entertaining the idea of exploring the plumbing involved in a content management system, using a platform that is arguably overkill for it.

After using Wordpress for a year, I've used 2.97 MB of the MySQL database, and that includes comments, and space used by plug-ins. I will probably retire from writing before I use all of the 500 MB allotted to me by Google.

You could say that each iteration marks an incremental increase in control over the platform. I will never be able to outdo Wordpress, but on the other hand my specifications are much more modest. This thing stores and retrieves text, and I'm pretty happy with that.

I was late to the Great AppSpot Squatting Party of 2008, hence the subdomain not being what you'd expect it to be. I take some comfort in the knowledge that someone out there thought that "transientem" was valuable enough to grab and sit on. I still wouldn't pay money for it, even if I knew who to contact. Overkill free hosting is attractive for a reason.

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I think that comments will be coming, eventually. It's just that I won't be the one implementing it. Spam prevention and form sanitization are interesting problems, but there are more dedicated people working on it, so if anything, I'll let them handle comments.

AdSense will also probably be coming, being on the sidebar and at the bottom of entries. Given that it's like free money, there's no sense in not having them. That said, I expect anyone reading this site to be on my level (you don't ever click ads as a matter of policy), or above (you have an ad blocker). I will probably get my cheque around the time I use all 500 MB of storage, all through impressions.

Shaking the Man's hand

After all this, you may have caught whiff of a trend. If you've followed me from my self-hosted Wordpress site, you know that the only images I have ever hosted are the ones that go into the site's theme. And now I'm not using a server, or any one server, that I can call my own, and I intend on delegating comments to yet another free host. Is this not an erosion of control?

Of course it is, and maybe this is naivety talking, but it doesn't bother me. The first iteration was not self-hosted either, and I used a third party comment host to boot. So in a sense, it's like I've come full circle, and the irony that I started with a Google service and have wound up back on a Google service is not lost on me. The difference this time around, is that I control the structure of the database as well as the templating. The experience has been educational: the process of retrieval and presentation is much more transparent to me.

Goals, or lack thereof

Being backed by a Google cluster and content delivery network — for free! — is also something to brag about, were it not for the fact that I have never approached the kind of load that would need either of those. Do I have any intention of growing readership? Not particularly. Still, memcache is standing by to field pretty much everything. Just in case.