Last week, the FSF dented about a MediaGoblin fund-raiser. Shortly after, Ben sent an email out to the FSM mail list indicating that he had used the service in the past and found himself donating. A couple of days later, a FSF e-mail hit my inbox pressuring me some more.
The funny thing is that whilst I’ve heard of the project, I don’t fully understand how it works and why I would use it. After all, if it’s just for sharing images I would either add them within WordPress, or otherwise simply do this by scp’ing them to a directory my server and link to them as required. This functionality works fine with my N900 as well, although clearly posting images online is not a service I have much demand for. Heck, not a week goes by that I don’t just use elinks for something.
Perhaps I’m not the target audience, but I’m probably also misunderstanding what MediaGoblin is all about. How does it compare to say ownCloud? The best way to understand it is to take it for a spin. Let’s take a look at the documentation… they compare it to Identi.ca and Libre.fm right off the bat. Wait a second… I use Identi.ca a lot but I’m not running it on my own hardware right now. Despite this I’m deploying some Goblin to my server that I don’t really understand? Time to change priorities.
What followed was me spending the rest of the day re-organising my DomU machines, web server configurations and finally installing my own StatusNet micro-blog at http://micro.systemsaviour.com/.
So far I haven’t customised my install too much. I haven’t even replaced the Status.Net heading with the site name, but can do that all in good time. As my usage of Identi.ca was previously almost exclusively limited to other Identi.ca accounts, I had not until now had a good chance to see for myself how well the federation features worked. While not perfect (eg. no direct messaging functionality, documented bugs preventing messages to groups sometimes appearing, etc.) I think it will live up to my expectations and be sufficiently useful to me to want to make the switch away from my boltronics@identi.ca account.
As for MediaGoblin, I’ll have to look at that again another weekend to see if I can figure out how it might be useful. As for Libre.FM, I don’t think I’ll be hosting my own GNU FM server any time soon given it doesn’t appear to have federation capabilities currently which would pretty much restrict its usefulness to scrobbling (which I don’t really care much for anyway). I have decided that I also want to run my own Gitorious install sooner rather than later. Too much cool tech… arrggh!!
October 28th 2012 update:
As expected, I have since spent some time messing around with MediaGoblin. The results are visible from the Images menu button above. I have yet to create a custom theme, and do not have registrations enabled – with no plans to do so; at least not until the software matures.