Website Aggregation without a DB

Laziness is the prime virtue of a good programmer (along with being a polyglot, knowing the ins and outs of their editor, and knowing how to google APIs), but it is often forgotten when working on a personal project.  My website has been no exception – I’ve actually spent far too much time writing my own session/users/form/template systems over the years.

No more! As of today, my website is lean and mean (technically as of a few months back, but I didn’t write anything about it at the time).  The major slimming factor? That nasty database layer that usually seems critical to the whole structure.  As it turns out though, there have been major improvements in the state of the web since I started hand-crafting web apps in 1998.  For one thing, the blogging craze has come and gone – as evidenced by the fact that I’ve started mine again.   More importantly, social networking sites are on the scene, allowing regular people to have a web presence without even needing to pick a template.    Other major changes are the availability of tons of storage on sites like flickr and picasaweb.

So why write that backend code at all?   My website now fetches all of its data via RSS feeds, with the actual updating, security, storage, and other annoying boilerplate being handled by companies with hundreds of employees.  The breakdown:

It’s not just me – aggregation sites are becoming more popular due to the proliferation of online presences out there.  Just look at Google Buzz, which offers aggregation as one of the main reasons to switch to it.   As far as I know, there aren’t any services that let you aggregate your myriad different profiles on your own domain, but even if there were, I still enjoy writing a few hundred lines of perl code to do what I used to do in a few thousand.