Now

Nov 16, 2024

I’m giving a lot of thought lately to the concept of data at rest: things that are better off at rest (like photo galleries, personal wikis, and such) versus data that should be in flight, like dynamic sites with more complicated requirements that must respond and react to external change. Even my work’s e-commerce website I believe is a candidate for a site that could be at rest, save for the customers’ actual purchase flow, of course.

There’s operational, mental, and labor taxes for systems that are in flight, be they of maintenance, security, or the cycle of updates and subsequent fixes. I’m a big fan of static sites that keep data, services, and functionality at rest, as they remove those burdens and offer durability, stability, and predictability.

I’m exploring alternatives to Bookstack for my personal knowledgebase. Bookstack offers some compelling features and it’s been a reliable tool for the last four years, but it requires active hosting, has to be exposed to and protected from the public internet (so I can access it on the go), and it keeps the data in flight in a DB. Because the data is so valuable to me, I’ve been thinking that this data ought to be at rest, so I’m weighing out and playing with other options.

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Now page adapted from Derek Sivers.

Prior entries are listed alongside the posts in my blog.