April 15th, 2005:

Went for a run again this morning. I’ve got a pretty decent plan that works pretty well to get my heart rate up without it beating right out of my chest.

I start out with a brisk walk from my house. After about 1/2 of the distance to the corner has been covered, I run until I get to the end. I go back to a brisk walk until I cross to the back street. Then, I run (though slower than before) the entire back street until I get to the end again. Then, it’s a brisk walk until I get back to my house.

This whole thing takes about 7 minutes. I only did it once this morning, since I got up too late. But, I intend to do it three times every morning. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll get faster and will need a lot more running and a lot less walking to keep my heart rate at a good level. So, I’ll adjust it as I go to keep my morning exercise to somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

When you take that and add a walk that’s twice as long, though less strenuous work, on most evenings, and I’d say that’s a pretty good boost for my metabolism and a decent way to increase my cardiovascular health. Plus, it might even help me drop a few pounds.

There are lots of great services all over the web these days. From LiveJournal, to Flickr, to Del.icio.us, to Tada, to 43Things. And, from the looks of it, these services are only going to get better and more numerous.

The availability of all of these services, however, leaves a difficult question in the minds of software developers and website owners: do we reimplement these services on our own, or two we integrate with existing services?

If I want a weblog on my site, do I simply link to LiveJournal? Do I use LiveJournal’s integration options to provide a small stub to the information contained at LiveJournal? Do I use extensive integration options to make it appear as though LiveJournal isn’t in use at all? Do I house my own data and use LiveJournal only for the community via syndication? Do I forget about LiveJournal all together?

If I want a gallery on my site, do I simply link to Flickr? Do I use their badging service to display recent items on my site? Do I use their API and write my own code to allow their services to be deeply integrated in my site? Do I house my own data and syndicate my image into their service for the community aspects of Flickr? Or, do I ignore Flickr all together?

Reinventing the wheel is stupid. Services like LiveJournal and Flickr are great. They are featureful, and have a great community. However, relying on these services means giving up a large piece of control. If a feature that isn’t included with these services is desired, there is no way to add it. If these services dissolve, go down, or are no longer maintained, we are left without those services for who knows how long. Implementing them ourselves is possible, but means redoing what’s already been done, and missing out in the community of it all. Of course, we could write even more code in order to house our own data AND participate in the community of it all.

So where do we draw the line? What do we implement in our own software, or software that we use on our own servers, and what do we rely on other services to provide for us?

The decision becomes even more difficult when we start to see these other services implementing integration methods between each other.

So where do you draw the line? What services are you willing to have hosted for you and what services do you insist on hosting yourself? What would you do if, tomorrow, those services that you rely on from others were to disappear… what would you do?

I’m sure quite a few of you have noticed the Ads on this site. These Ads are powered by Google’s “AdSense”:https://google.com/adsense/ program. I’ve included them to attempt to offset some of the costs of running this site. I don’t get a lot of traffic, but I get enough to matter. In web traffic alone, I transfer more data in a month than Jess’ mom has hard drive space. The Ads just get a little of that back. They’ve been running for about 4 weeks now, and work on a pay-per-click basis (i.e. if someone clicks, I get paid). If everything keeps going as it is, I’ll make about $1 a day. Not great, but it helps a little.

Do the ads annoy you? Are they slowing the site down? Are they in a bad spot? Are they marked clearly enough that you understand that I am not directly providing that content? Did you even notice them?

I appreciate your feedback on this.

My “INBOX”:http://revjim.net/page/inbox/, as of right now, has 63 messages in it. All of them require some effort on my part. At *most*, there are 10 that are of the read and file variety. There are 5 or so that serve as a reminder for something in the future. That leaves at *least* 48 that deserve (or require) some kind of response from me. If you’re one of them, I’m sorry. I hope to get to them all today. I’ve just had a lot going on lately.