A word from the proprietor...

My list site was the coming together of several ideas. I already had my own personal pages for bookmarks, contacts and so on but they were independent of each other and they were not the kind of pages one could modify with ease. Why did I have my own personal pages for this kind of stuff when I could of used dedicated sites for such purposes? I could of used del.icio.us for bookmarks, yahoo for contacts, google for… well you get the picture; a new service comes along and before you know it your data is duplicated and spread all over the web… either that or you trap yourself and use just one or two sites. And, you know, the really important information I always kept in text files on a USB drive just-in-case. Also, I can easily share those text files with others, I just copy-and-paste them into emails. They do not require Internet access or a special program. The text file is truly accessible and universal.

At the same time, I was thinking about building other applications for alwayspages. For every application I thought of there was a list, for example, a web-to-sms service would need a list of people and their numbers. And from the users point of view, suppose they wanted to use someone else’s sms service? - what would make my service so special? Would they again need to duplicate their info? The answer, of course, has already been established; no single site could possibly do everything you want and if it did, you would potentially be closing yourself off to other possibilities.

Text files are okay but they have two problems. It’s one thing to store data as text but what if you want calculations on your portfolio or your contacts sorted by date of birth? Presentation is important.

The other problem is getting a computer to understand your text. You could format your text in a certain way to make it easier for computers but, quite frankly, getting people to type CSV or XML with all those commas, quotes and angle brackets is just plain not going to happen. The solution must be simple to learn and truly human readable. That’s when I found something called YAML (rhymes with “camel”) with just four basic rules. The real beauty of this is that once you’ve learnt how to write one list, all your other lists will flow with ease; Learn Once, Use Always.

To summarise, what I built was a service which you can learn in 5 minutes. A service you can completely walk away from AND take all your data with you.