New Zealand or BUST

In less than an hour I'll be on a plane bound for Auckland, New Zealand. I'm writing this while Shalom and Kelsey explore around the Honalulu airport. I've meant to write all along, but I have been procrastination as I've yet to find the perfect blog software. I have been looking at writing my own in Django/Python, but the truth is I just want some basic functionality to post my thoughts and updates to friends back home. I don't want to spend time maintaining some software just for my use when so many maintained versions exist. Not only maintained codewise, but deployed and managed. This entry tells how I ended up dumping just about everything else and jumping on the Google bandwagon.

Shalom's birthday was October 9th. On the 8th we ended up being stranded at Ezra's house because we didn't have any transportation. After hitching a ride into Pahoa to get some groceries and get Kelsey's hair cut, I joked with the girls about them being Hippie Chicks. Just for fun I looked up the domains and sure enough hippiechicks.org was available. I purchased the domain and went about setting it up for use with google apps. It's a bit tedious, but not difficult to use the web based domain control interface at joker.com to create the CNAME and MX records necessary to have google host mail and a few applications. Actually I think it took less than an hour for the domain to appear and for me to get it up and running with Google Apps.

As I went through the setup process I saw how well designed and thought and a lot of details where. The standard set of apps that come with google apps for you own domain are:

• gmail
• docs
• chat
• calendar
• sites

You've probably already seen gmail, but if you haven't seen Google docs, it's worth checking out. Basically a webbrowser based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software. The interesting thing here is being able to colaborate with multiple people on a single document having it saved in realtime without having to email it back and forth. Chat is nice, and having your own xmmp/jabber federated chat for your own domain is pretty cool. The sites is pretty cheesy, but probably fits the needs for most folks trying to put up some static content.The girls seem pretty happy with the setup, though not as impressed as I was. Though I thought giving someone a domain configured to work with google was a pretty cool birthday gift, Shalom probably would have prefered a day at the spa. (Which she is still going to get)

A day later I got a call from my friend Steve Delaney back in Texas. He wanted to setup a simple website for his new non-profit called Lifesong and get mail up and running on his own domain. Having just done it for Shalom and Kelsey, going with Google was going to be the quickest way to set it up. It would have been even faster had I realized that I could have actually just gone to google.com/a and put in the unregistered domain name and paid $10/year for it to with godaddy and have it automatically configured to work with Google apps. The ease with which I did this was startling, even though I had to configure the domain again with Joker.com. Next time I do this for an unregistered domain, you can bet I'll just sign up for an automatically configured one from the start with Google. I bet you'd be up in running in less than ten minutes.

Having done this twice for other folks and having it go so smoothly, I went ahead and moved over my hippiehacker.org mail, jabber/xmmp/chat, calendaring, addressbook and such from a combination of fastmail.fm, Apple's Mobile Me, and some home grown software to Gmail, Google Chat, Google Calendar hosted on Google Apps. Up to this point I had only tried the free on Standard version of Google Apps. For my own account I decided to go with Premier. The main added benefits are:

• Ad Free (I hate ads)
• 25 gigs of mail storage (as opposed to about 7 for Standard)
• Phone and Email support from Google (turns out I needed it)

The tagging feature of gmail is really grand. I like the way it integrates with IMAP. However since I can't login to IMAP yet, it's been something I long for, rather than actually use. I've sent in an email support ticket. If it's not working by the time I get a chance to get on the internet again, I'll Skype call them and see if they can't figure out what's up.

Aside from IMAP I've been really happy with the whole experience. I recently started using Google's picasa for my photos. I know flickr is the bigger player in this space, but I liked the geotagging and intergration with Google Earth that picasa provides. I tried Google video, but it lacks geotagging and feels.... well kinda clunky compared to youtube. So I'm using youtube for videos. It was only natural to use blogger for my blogging software at this point.

The only this missing at this point is a way to tie it all together in what folks are calling a lifestream. Basically a way to list all the things you post on the internet so people can get updates. I did a bit of research and went with friendfeed.com. The even have a widget that you can add to your website.

Currently I've settled on using the following combinations:

• blogger for blogging
  
• picasa for pictures
  
• youtube for videos
  
• twitter for microblogging
• facebook for social networking
• linkedin for professional networking
• friendfeed for aggregation
• Google Apps for my own services:
  
  • GMail for mail.hippiehacker.org
  • Google Docs for docs.hippiehacker.org
  • Google Chat for Jabber, XMPP, Chat (chris at hippiehacker.org)
  • Google Calendar for calendar.hippiehacker.org
  • Google Sites for sites.hippiehacker.org (no sites setup with them yet.)
    

With all this done I feel like I've found best of breed for each of the parts of my online presence and can now get to blogging. We should be touching down in Fiji within the hour!