Owning your tools

In the engineering world, the phrase “make or buy” or “build or buy” is common. It represents a design choice/decision to purchase components/equipment/software for a project (buy) or create it yourself (make/build). Things that are considered include cost, ease of inclusion in the design, flexibility, and other attributes. For software users, a similar choice exists, which could be called “set up your own tools, or use services provided by others”. Things to consider are cost, ease of use, features, and portability and ownership of data, among other things.

I use River5 as a feed aggregator, and create single page apps to display combined feeds (Andy Sylvester’s Reading List). There is some friction to start (get a server if you don’t have one, install software, set up single page apps) and some friction for updates (have to FTP subscription list updates), but after the setup is complete, I have had almost no problems. I could have used some online service (Feedly, Flipboard, many others), but then I would be dependent on those services (could have outages, terms and conditions might change, other restrictions on the service might occur, the service could go out of business). Similarly, I use my own install of WordPress on the Bluehost hosting service. I control it, I decide when it gets upgrades, and I can keep backups and move it to another service if I want.

To me, the cost/inconvenience is worth it to own/control the tools I am using. Whatever you do, be mindful of the choices you make….