find my way.

Prop 8 ruled unconstitutional.

More from NPR.

Text of the decision. (Update: direct PDF links on the 9th Circuit website, since Scribd is behaving weirdly for some.)



NO STOPPING INDEED.

Given that:

- Yahoo has proven itself incredibly unreliable for long-term data archiving;
- Yahoo just laid off the majority of Flickr's customer service team, including the ones savvy and high-level and Flickr-versed enough to translate customer issues into bug reports;
- I have 4000+ photos over on Flickr, and my Flickr Pro account expires at the end of this month;
- The cost of archiving these photos at Picasa would run me somewhere between $50-$100/year by my best guestimate (this is not a dealbreaker in and of itself);
- I prefer to not have all of my data under one large corporation's control;

I think I'm moving my photohosting to SmugMug, assuming that either Smugglr or Migratr works out for moving all my photos with metadata intact. I know the community feel isn't as great over there, but I'm not sure anywhere else is, even on Picasa. Has anybody else made the Flickr-SmugMug migration?

I'm not totally leaving Flickr; a good number of friends still post their pictures there. I know I can go month-to-month on Flickr, and I may overlap that with SmugMug membership for a little while. Even if I ditch Pro, I think old photo links will remain intact, so overlap may not be totally necessary. We'll see.

As for other web services, I have found Google gradually taking over all aspects of my weblife to an uncomfortable degree, so:

- I've made DuckDuckGo my default search engine in lieu of Google Search. I find DDG's results to be at least as good as Google's, and sometimes even a little superior; they offer the ability to "repeat this search on Bing or Google;" their privacy policy and lack of tracking is a much-needed breath of fresh air (and readable in plain English!); you can install secure https:// search in Firefox; and it just plain uses less memory on my poor old netbook. From a UX perspective, it's clean and pretty intuitive.

- I've gone back to Firefox from Chrome; I don't know exactly what information-gathering advantages Google has when I read GMail or GReader or use GChat in Chrome, but I suspect if they exist, they're quite integrated.

- I'm still vaguely looking for a replacement RSS reader; HiveMined hasn't panned out (read: they've been stuck at 81% complete for over two months now), but I haven't liked the overly cluttered UI of the existing options. In this case, sticking with GReader is not a dealbreaker.

- I still think GMail is the best email product out there, though I don't like the recent UI changes because they EAT RAM LIKE NOBODY'S BUSINESS AUGH. But I'll stick with GMail and GTalk.

- As for G+, I guess I should check in on that, but I get the feeling most of what's in my circles there is crossposts from other social media sources like Facebook and Twitter.

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Anybody else giving similar consideration to their digital workflow?