Who in their right mind would ever want to store their working documents somewhere, out there, “in the cloud”, i.e., on someone else’s servers? I openly wondered this a few weeks ago and have wondered about it ever since the idea was first proposed many years ago.

It turns out that the answer is… me.

Here’s how it happened: I contribute to a video game database named MobyGames. A long time ago, I started creating a series of plain ASCII files to help me track which games aren’t in the database yet. Other people wanted to submit new lists and help me maintain the existing lists. For the last 6 months, I have been occasionally brainstorming and researching how to create a very simple, database-backed, collaborative web application.

Yesterday, I thought of a better solution: A Google spreadsheet. My, that was easy. It pretty much does everything I was hoping my collaborative web app would do and it required zero coding on my part.

People often suggested that I set up a wiki in order to manage this type of data. I generally consider a wiki to be the poor man’s content management system (CMS) — little more than a giant, distributed, collaborative whiteboard (ironically, before I set up the MultimediaWiki on top of MediaWiki, I had again spent a long time brainstorming my own custom database-backed web app for the same purpose). I wanted a little more structure imposed on this data which is exactly what the spreadsheet can provide. A proper database would be even better but I’m willing to compromise for the sake of just having something useful with minimal effort on my part.

Still, I was hoping that writing a simple web app in some kind of existing, open source framework would be a great exercise for making a more complex web app out of FATE. My occasional study of web frameworks during the past 6 months has taught me that that’s something I genuinely don’t wish to mess with.