Reflection--blogging in the cloud?

The last few days I have been spending my leisure time coding myself a blog application. It wasn’t my first attempt and not the first success either. This time I used a different route though. Instead of writing it all my own and reinventing the wheel over and over, this time I decided to go the “Cloud” route.

The way I think about “Cloud” is somewhat related to “Mashups”. Instead of providing the whole computing power myself, I use many different services that are provided in the “Cloud” (read: Internet).

Therefore this blog is build upon some of the latest technology available. I will call the engine “Reflection”

• Django ontop of Google App Engine via app-engine-patch
• Disqus for comments
• Feedburner to set the atom feed on fire
• pingoat to ping blog interested services
• Add to Any for social bookmarking
• Google AdSense for the ad-units
• Google Analytics for the statistics

Thus, what did I really do? I only wrote a few hundred lines of python code to glue it all together and this resulted in a pretty fast, quite feature-rich blog engine.

There is one big drawback over other blog engines like wordpress, and that is ironically the part I used to promote Reflection. I have limited to no control over any of those external servers. I can only control what I upload to appengine, what comments I remove on disqus, etc. even worse, if one of those services goes down, I loose part of the functionality of this blog. Furthermore four out of those 6 services are run by Google. You could argue that the probability of discontinuation of one of those services is unlikely it’s still a vivid thread to this setup. If you are still interested, subscribe to my feed and you won’t miss when I release the code!