Friday was my last day working as a contractor for the GFDL. I had friends there before I ever worked there, so I’m sad to be leaving them, but I’m happy to be moving on to a really exciting opportunity. I’m now an employee of AddThis.com.
I’ll be able to focus on architecture, and how to scale out an internet-based service, which is quite different from scaling an internal IT infrastructure, if only because the growth is exponentially faster. I’ll still be working with databases and virtualization, web servers and DNS, but this opportunity also gives me the chance to do quite a bit of development work, which I’ve been wanting to do.
Best of all – none of the development work I’ll be doing involves designing interfaces, and the back end stuff I’m working on is mostly Python. I’m happiest when I’m not coding stuff that has to render aesthetically pleasing results. That tier is best left to people who specialize in that. I just munge data and code business logic. 🙂
So, at some point, I have to make a choice as well, regarding my blog, because I’m not going to work for AddThis.com and then *not* use the product (and truthfully, I *want* to use the product). Just having social bookmark links is ok, but being able to view statistics related not only to what eyeballs landed on the page, but to what people found interesting enough to bookmark is valuable.
WordPress.com has been good to me, but I’ve been feeling the pain of not being able to add really *any* per post goodies for some time. For a while I was manually adding social bookmark links to each post, and manually adding technorati tags to each post. Know what happens when you do that? It makes blogging more of a chore, and something I’m less likely to do. So do I host the blog myself somewhere else, or do I find another non-wordpress solution altogether? I had a nightmare of a time with Blogger – has it gotten any better? Does it support trackbacks yet? Can a blog published to a non-blogger.com url have labels?
What about other blog services? Are there any that provide the niceties of the WordPress software, but without the limitations of the WordPress.com service? I really like categories, I like (but don’t need) the GUI blogging interface, and I *really* like that I don’t have to host it myself and maintain the blog software. Ideas are hereby solicited.