It's been a week now since we packed up and moved into the cloud. The cloud is, of course, Google, who now hosts our email and calendaring (and a host of other features), all addressed by my domain, northerncrown.com. $50/year/user for all this stuff. $4/month, which is less than the apocryphal half-caf double-foam latte that we snarkily use as a unit of measure when describing waste and American profligacy. And I don't smoke!

"Can't you get free webmail already," I hear you sigh. In these days of telephone number portability and cheap domain ownership ($9/year with GoDaddy), I really wasn't interested in giving up my email address to move to a gmail address or even my dear old AOL. I've owned northerncrown.com for nearly ten years now (whois reports "Creation Date: 17-aug-1998"), and like my cellphone number (nine years old), I intend to keep it forever. I see a future of daughter1@northerncrown.com, daughter2@northerncrown.com, and on and on. It's our place, a veritable family compound on the Internet.

What'd I give up? I gave up reading mail via pine. I gave up manipulating mail as chunks of files on a filesystem, archiving and such. Some level of privacy, I think.

What'd I gain? A very nice web client. IMAP access. Access to mail from everywhere. Great searching of email contents. Top-notch spam filtering. Shared calendaring with the rest of my family that works well. Freedom from worries about backups. Room for years of mail. I have some ten years of mail keepers archived and it's less than 1GB. The new account offers 25GB per user.

"Are you a paid spokesman/mouthpiece/lackey/fanboi/apologist for the GOOG?" Nope, just a satisfied customer.

So, my family and friends, if you need a permanent home on the Internet, one that need not ever change, no matter your ISP or cable company's machinations, let me know. Northerncrown can be your home, too.

We're doing a bit of shuffling in the basement and the eight-year old rack of computers and such had to come out. I may have to see a therapist about my heretofore hidden affinity for cable ties.

A house full of laptops, communicating over wireless protocols sounds pretty good right now.

Ok, major dork detour here. If you aren't into blog software, then keep moving.

Nothing is ever really hidden on the Internet. Secret memos get out, personal information is revealed, and other such fun. I've been wanting to post some pages here on my site but hide them from blosxom, the blog software I use. Sure, I could just toss up some html pages outside of blosxom's control, but I wanted to use the features of blosxom, like the templates and the various plugins I have installed. The pages wouldn't really be secret, just not presented as a blog story or visible in the categories listing.

After some poking at the various plugins, I used the combination of these two plugins:

• exclude
• categorylist (which I already had installed)

Refer to the blosxom site for the location of the plugins or you can also refer to the website of the Unofficial Blosxom User Group.

I got the files from these locations, but can't vouch for these locations being valid in the future:

• http://blosxom.ookee.com/blosxom/plugins/v2/exclude-v20060102
• http://blosxom.ookee.com/blosxom/plugins/v2/categorylist-v0i2i5

exclude allows you to create an exclusion file containing the file or directory name patterns (regular expressions) that should be excluded from the blog.

categorylist provides the list of posting categories (blogs, music, etc) that you see in the sidebar of this blog and many others.

Install each plugin in your blosxom plugin directory, preferably one at a time, followed by the verification that you haven't broken anything with the plugin.

Since these are to be rarely used pages, I created a directory called 'static' in the blosxom data directory, where the rest of my stories and category directories live.

In the static directory, create the file that excludes this directory from category listings:

$ touch static/category.exclude

Now, to keep the posting from being seen by blosxom and presented as a new blog post, create the exclusions file and add the pattern which matches your file or directory name. The contents of my file shows that I want to exclude any posts that have the pattern 'static/' in the file path:

$ cat exclude_patterns
static/

The location of the exclude_patterns file is configured in the exclude plugin itself.

Voila! Any posts placed in the static directory are not presented as blog postings which effectively makes the hidden from most viewers. It then takes direct knowledge of the URL to access the page.

This is, of course, not a valid method for hiding information from the all-knowing Internet.

Although the Mac and Windows are the primary platform (and me a Linux guy, oh the pain of modern life, how will I go on?), it's still fascinating to me to see the emergence of real and friendly tech at AOL. Take a spin by the AOL Greenhouse:

The Greenhouse is a place to incubate the interesting prototypes, AOL developed tools, and other fun features and applications that spring from the minds of AOL staffers. We invite you to try these early concepts and submit your feedback. We're still putting the finishing touches on the Greenhouse itself, so if you find some dirt scattered about or the plantings a little uneven, let us know and keep checking back

Yeah, I work there. And what I really dig is that dude and his monkey in the logo.

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