About a week ago I heard the news that GeoCities is finally shutting down, something that I had wrongly thought had been done some time ago. So, with many other geeks I’ve been bring back memories of regular visits to my friends personal websites full of animated gifs and links to other ‘cool’ stuff on the web. These memories have got me thinking about the future, should we still all have a personal homepage in a multi-social-network age? And if so why are we not using it? And what should it be?
So we, the internet generation, might have started out with GeoCities homepages, but we moved on to blogging and are now part of a multi-network community. Whilst being part of a community we have actively given all of our content away to other keymasters, such as Google, Twitter, Yahoo and especially Facebook. Facebook is an intersting point though, it is a personal homepage, but it remains behind a firewall allowing only friends to access private data. Then I got to thinking, just about everything else has an RSS feed and I would like to have a summary all in one place, yet something that is mine.
Right now I’ve started to put together a single homepage (link to my homepage – www.oliverlorton.co.uk) which brings in a selection of my RSS feeds into one place. It is nothing more than an online business card with an RSS reader built in, but I like it. I’m using PHP and MagpieRSS to make it all work and I hope to release it as an open source project soon. Anyone interested in helping me to get this off the ground should get in touch, you can do so here.
Update 24/07/2009: I have since started another more worthwhile project which demands more of my time. I would still be interested to hear from anyone who is interested in using this software though, so please get in touch.