{"id":1575,"date":"2009-06-10T23:22:43","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T06:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2009-06-10T23:40:13","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T06:40:13","slug":"practical-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/practical-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> and have wondered about it ever since the idea was first proposed many years ago.<\/p>\n

It turns out that the answer is… me<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here’s how it happened: I contribute to a video game database named MobyGames<\/a>. A long time ago, I started creating a series of plain ASCII files<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I thought of a better solution: A Google spreadsheet<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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)<\/a> — little more than a giant, distributed, collaborative whiteboard (ironically, before I set up the MultimediaWiki<\/a> on top of MediaWiki<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have started using Google Docs for their spreadsheet functionality and thereby acquiescing to the fad of cloud computing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[202,203,201],"class_list":["post-1575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fate-server","tag-google-spreadsheet","tag-mobygames","tag-web-app"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1581,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions\/1581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}