2013-04-14 Hello Again World

Do people still blog? Is that still a thing?

Not sure why I feel like blogging all of a sudden. The urge might vanish as soon as it appeared. But maybe it won't. Who knows.

Woah, I just clicked the preview button and looked at my blog for the first time in a few years. I still like the look of it (the eyes are cool, aren't they?), but man are the links outdated. Maybe I'll update them. But maybe I won't. Who knows.

Okay, how do I start? I'm probably not going to write about my life much any more. It's a great one, but I don't think it can be interesting to anyone who doesn't already know about it. I think I'll just write about stray thoughts that cross my mind every now and then.

One of them is Google. It started for me when they announced that they were going to kill Google Reader.
I know that RSS feeds are going out of style, and that a lot of people use Twitter, Facebook or Google+ for keeping up with the world. But being old-fashioned, I was still using Google Reader. Not Feedly. Not Twitter. And sure as hell not Facebook.
Until Google announced that they were going to kill it. That got me thinking. How much exactly do I depend on Google? It's bit scary, if you think of it. So I wrote my own RSS reader in Python. It doesn't have many features. No starring or forwarding or sharing or any of that. But it shows me my feeds, and it supports the hotkeys that I'm used to. And right now I'm working on my own version of gmail. For the moment it will be using Google's SMTP/IMAP server (so that I don't have to change my email address), but it will probably support more than one back-end.
I am fully aware of the irony of using blogger to complain about Google. But I really want to, and I can't reimplement everything all at once. It'll be fun to try, though.

The good Bruce Schneier (whose blog I can still follow because of my shiny new RSS reader) also mentioned an alternative search engine: DuckDuckGo. As the (somewhat unfortunate) name suggests, it's not nearly as fast as Google. But it shows decent results, and it's not Bing.

So yeah. Long story short: I'm currently replacing or reimplementing the parts of Google that are relevant to me. And I'm writing about it with Chrome.

I think I'm going to start blogging again. But maybe I won't. Who knows.