How to Manage Personal Content

This post serves as a guide on how to create and manage your personal content without losing control of it.

Background
Think about the enormous amount of information a person generates in their lifetime. You could be taking pictures, creating presentations, blog posts, creditcard purchases (which come as statements), etc. In spite of all the techonological innovations available, there does not exist a single current solution to encapsulate all of that disparate information and present it in a uniform and, more importantly, secure way.

I started looking into uniform, secure storage after nearly losing some photos in a laptop in a harddisk that crashed and after some personal experiences with certain photo sharing sites that refused to release (delete) my content.

Structure
I wanted the following:

1. My content to be located in a safe, secure location 
2. My content to have 99.9999 % availability
3. Flexibility to interact with the content (via custom API that conforms to standards)
4. Being able to uniquely identify the content

Approach

1. I started off by registering my domain name (http://www.sukul.org/)
2.  I then signed up for a free DNS service (http://www.zoneedit.com/)
3. I signed up for the Amazon S3 storage account (paid) (http://aws.amazon.com/s3)
4. I created the top level "buckets" to organize my information
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. 
   I registered CNAME entries on my DNS to map to those buckets:
   
   
   
   
   
6. Although not 100% perfect, I am the stage where I do not have to rely on third party sites to share my content like photos. The URI also makes sense when referring to a particular piece of content; for ex:
   http://pictures.sukul.org/blog/shailen/cname_alias.png. I can also stream videos and audios from my storage location on demand. Note: Amazon S3 is charged on bandwidth served, so think about your audience and charges before streaming large files
7. I can control security from a bucket to a folder and even an item level. It gives me a great degree of control over who can access my data
8. Futures: I intend to finish off a personal project that will allow users to subscribe and securely store their content using the store above. Extending that, I could build a CRM system for individuals to manage personal finances and have enterprise level reporting and trending of their spend. Just wish I could devote more time to this...