Yesterday I wrote about for-the-record blogging and did a 6-minute podcast on why that's important, and how we haven't done much if anything to address the problem.#
One of the big concerns is where to store the pre-rendered version of your writing. At this point that pretty much means using a commercial service, something owned by a big company, which has problems of its own. For example, where Facebook can change their API overnight, it's hard to imagine Amazon doing the same with S3. Their API is their business model. For Facebook, the API is just nice-to-have. #
BTW, Facebook did throw out, quickly, a big part of their API, because it was an attack vector used by Russian spammers. I don't blame them. I went in with my eyes open. #
That's why I think, on reflection, that GitHub, especially since it has been acquired by Microsoft, represents a pretty good option, one of the best we have, maybe even better than S3. Why? Again, the API -- GIT -- is the product. GitHub without GIT is a vastly different product. Microsoft could evolve it, say in 10 years, to the point where GIT is as important as SMS is for Twitter, an ancient legacy, supported half-heartedly (I was never a fan of SMS in Twitter, btw). It could happen. But in this world, ten years is a long time. It shouldn't be, but it is.#
Another fact in its favor is that Microsoft has an excellent reputation for continuity over the years by not deprecating past APIs, preserving software and data compatibility. I haven't been following closely in recent years, but in the 90s and through the 00s I marveled that new Microsoft OSes could still run software I shipped for MS-DOS in the early 80s. Somewhere deep in Microsoft's DNA, we hope, still lurks a reverence for how we got where are. #
GitHub was sure to get acquired by someone. Microsoft was probably as good as they could have done. #
Another thing about GitHub is that they, prior to the Microsoft acquisition at least, encouraged us to think of it as a backend for a website. #
So I think it's a pretty good place to start for a future-safe for-the-record blogging back-end. #
PS: I have a couple of projects I started in the last couple of years that relate to this. English, a wizzy editor for GitHub docs and readme's, uses GitHub's OAuth-based API. And a Node app, GitHubPub, that serves via templates from GitHub repos, with custom domain names. Between the two, you could get to a very low cost Medium clone, the ideal of the for-the-record blogging concept, with hosting done for free by Microsoft. It's scary in a way how high you can build without paying a bill or even a strategy tax. #