While the topic is rather broad and full of possibilities, what I’m really going to talk about here is the future of “telling stories on the internet”.

I have had web servers since the mid-1990s. Since then I have created several web sites to document my activities, from university courses to my teaching career and now my hobbies and “other stuff”. At the moment I have three active sites: one for glassblowing, one for scuba diving, and one for general “stuff”, including general work around the house.

Recently I installed and tried out wordpress (this blog) which I do like. But it’s not the same as those hand crafted web pages with photos and links to youtube (or vimeo) videos.

My conundrum right now is that I have started the process of building a 3-d printer from scratch. It will be open hardware and is helped by a colleague at AU who has also built one. I would like to document the build in detail, but I’m caught in a bounty of “hows”. I could build a web page, which I’ve done in the past

(i.e. http://www.huntrods.com/teaching/raspberrypi.html ) or I could just blog the adventure here. I would like to connect to the AU landing as I’ve created a robotics group there which might benefit from the posts. That requires RSS feeds.

WordPress has RSS feeds built in, and I’ve already connected that to my landing main blog. This very post will appear on the landing soon. I can easily connect the rss feed to the robotics group as well. So using wordpress is OK, but I’m not convinced yet that wordpress blogs are where I want to do this.

Which means back to my static web pages. The problem is, they don’t generate rss without significant intervention by either a program, service or manual labor. I’ve had a look at the on-line tools,  and am in the process of digesting whether java can do the job easily or not.

Stay tuned…