The Inter-not-very
I’m sick of the strange piecemeal glue between various webservices. There just aren’t enough good standards, and they aren’t implemented well enough. It seems that everything I do has to be hard work. I could make a living doing beautiful blogs for people, it’s such annoying work. It’s not that I spend a lot of time on it, it’s just that it takes so much more time than it feels like it ought.
There’s no unified content publishing system around the; I want all the big services to throw away their proprietary APIs and use AtomPub, OStatus, OpenID, and so on. Just to repost my content around half a dozen sites, I need to use as many services to do the dirty for me.
Tumblr for example has a beautiful, well-designed API, but it’s unique to them, so Goodreads doesn’t support it (their API is messy and horrible by the way, but I switched to them because LibraryThing is even worse—I never could get my latest books to show up on my homepage consistently; they have disgusting terms of service; and it turns out now that I have to pay). Goodreads, in any case, is a nice provider of data to mash up, but I had to resort to writing my own shim just to cross-post my latest reviews to the tumbleblog nicely. I hate doing that; it’s capitulation, but I always end up writing everything on my sites from scratch because existing systems are too flaky or closed. What a nuisance. One day, we’ll get the web right.