Frontpage skills not required

My family has always been into technology. Specifically though, they are into the technological benefits, not so much the sausage making that goes into it. We all have computers, broadband, DVRs, VOIP, etc, but there’s no talk of SSH or RDP at the reunions.

We’ve talked quite a bit about the need for a family “homepage”, where we could all post pictures and videos – generally sharing stuff. Once I was maintaining my own servers at a datacenter, there’s not much in the way from making that happen, and I considered installing something like DotNetNuke or Community Server or one of the PHP CMS systems out there. But I realized that once I installed it, it was going to immediately be obsolete unless I was willing to spend the energy to stay on top of it installing patches, extensions and updates. I knew I wasn’t going to have time for this with the whole building a startup business thing.

So we are now doing a trial run of using a Facebook group for this purpose. Benefits:

• No maintenance
• Photos w/ people tagging support, makes it easy to see all pictures of “Aunt Nancy” regardless of folder structure
• Video support. Interestingly I asked for this feature just about two weeks before they turned it on? Coincidence? **
• “Mini feed” makes it easy to see what is new, which is the main thing you do if you were coming a family homepage
• As Facebook gets better and and apps start to support groups, we get those feature integrated automatically

The photo is from my parents wedding day in 1974 (they each had two kids from previous marriages).

** When I was a kid, I would always order two Taco Bell tacos and wondered, either in my head, to my family or to the staff (not sure which), why don’t they just make a bigger taco. And when the Taco Bell Grande was released I was convinced it was on my recommendation.