On LJ and DW ...

[dawn_felagund]

I've avoided talking much about LJ's latest shenanigans. Part of this is just sheer exhaustion with the regular cycle on LJ-induced outrage that has been going on since SixApart bought LiveJournal twelve years ago. Twelve years, y'all.I've also been posting to Dreamwidth with automatic crossposts to LiveJournal for seven years now. (Yeesh. All this

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[dawn_felagund]

And I thought I had the slowest loading internet in the world.

I sometimes remind myself that I don't either and that people who live in rural areas outside the U.S. would probably think what I have is lightning fast! :) I have satellite Internet, which means that if it is raining, cloudy, or snowing, then the speed drops significantly. Or if I'm trying to use the Internet while Bobby's watching a snowboarding video or surfing Facebook. Pretty much it sucks unless I'm hone alone on a sunny day (like now! And even today, I have had problems with LJ, which tells me it is on their end and not on mine for once.)

I never managed to get that notification system to work for me.

That's my fault because I never bothered to fully learn WordPress. :^\ I learned enough to set up the site and that was it. My sister did a lot for me last year to make it less embarrassingly bad than it was but I hate depending on people to do things for me and really ought to have learned WP for myself rather than asking for her help. And it's stupid that I never learned--I can't explain why! I have learned Drupal, where the learning curve is like Everest compared to the flight of stairs posed by WP. Or I can build my own site from scratch but don't know the first thing about WP plugins. It's really stupid and embarrassing.

Anyway, I'm eventually going to move my whole site to Drupal, including the HL, which means I'll actually be able to set up things that work. When I do that will depend on how quickly we are ready to move the SWG ... the SWG gets priority, of course.

If ever you want your own site, I'd help you set it up if you wanted, and/or you could even host your domain on my server space, so you would not have to pay for hosting (just the domain name). This could solve the image-hosting issue too. For me, having my own site is more about having a space that I control completely (aside from my webhost's ToS ... but if they pulled an LJ on me, I could move to a different host if I wanted). I don't like counting on other people to want to maintain a project or not to change their mind about something that is important to me (like how LJ was ad-free when I joined and friendly, both of which changed when SixApart came on-board and only worsened with SUP).

I lament the fall of old-school LJ too. I remember when if I missed a day or two of reading my flist, it was impossible to catch up. Now I can read my flist in fifteen minutes on a good day. I just fished out an old link from 2007, and I had posts with dozens of people commenting ... on dumb shit about my everyday life! Nothing momentous. Most of the people I feel really close to I either met or interacted with regularly on LJ.

I don't think the loss of that was entirely LJ's fault--although their boneheadedness didn't do any favors!--but more the appeal of "micro-blogging" (don't know if you could hear me gagging as I typed that ;) and the instant gratification (I just typed "gratifucation"! ha!) of sites like Tumblr and Twitter. I have accounts on both but have been able to get into neither because it's the deeper interaction with content and people that I want--in short, old-school LJ.

I actually enjoy your pictures and your journaling in general. I like that you share your everyday life; I want to do better with that but have trouble making it a priority, which means it doesn't get done.

[heartofoshun]

I think part of my problem is my crazed hatred of "micro-blogging"--Laura comes to me a dozen times a week asking me what I think someone meant by their two-word response to her ten-word entry. I cannot wrap my mind about limiting myself to that kind of communication with others.

[dawn_felagund]

I agree! I have Twitter because it seems required to have an online Presence these days outside of fandom, but I mostly use it only to post links to my work and other people's Tolkien-related stuff (like your character bios!) Whenever I try to use it otherwise, I frustrate myself trying to meet the limits or what I say falls flat. Brevity is not a strength of mine, as though I have to tell you of all people that.

Also! Do you subscribe to heretic_lore? It's a way to get notifications of new HL posts in your friends feed. (It's an RSS feed, so I do not get notified of comments to the feed, so you shouldn't comment on LJ, but it will at least let you know when I have a new post up with a link if you want to leave a comment or read what others have said.) After my [lengthy ... ha!] lament over my lack of WP skills, I remembered this.

[heartofoshun]

Apparently, I do not or I would get notifications. Let me see if I can figure out how that works.

[dawn_felagund]

It's more or less the same as friending a journal or a community. It's just not updated by a person but via RSS whenever I update my blog.

[heartofoshun]

Thanks!