Jakob predicts that web services will spell the end of homemade websites. Though he misses the obvious huge example, I think he’s probably right to an extent. But on every project, you have to guage the importance of the requirements and whether spooging those into a pre-built solution is acceptable. For example, I use PicoSearch for search functionality on my Dahl site. It’s not ideal, but it’s not enough of a priority for me to expend the time and energy to write something myself. But for both RDF and w-g, I decided that I needed to write my own database-driven blogging system. Blogger isn’t always reliable and I wanted something that I could have more control over. So while I think web services are going to lower the barrier to getting online for a lot of people, I don’t think they’re going to completely negate the need for people who know how to create custom solutions. The longer you’re online, the more you want to create a unique place just for you.
Important Note
This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.