Contra on LiveJournal
Some of you knew this already, but for a few weeks now I have been posting Contra entries to my account on LiveJournal, perhaps the most sophisticated bloghosting service out there. I wasn't sure for awhile that I would stick with it, but the more I probe the details of LiveJournal, the more I like it.
So what I'm going to do for awhile is post both to this page and to LiveJournal. Unless something radically wrong happens with LiveJournal, I'll continue to post to it. However, I will also post here, at least until I figure out how to retain reliable archives of the material in the event that LiveJournal goes away.
LiveJournal provides RSS feeds, something I could do manually if I felt like spending the time on itbut time is a big problem for me right now. Syndication is one way to get a broader readership, which I would like to have. LiveJournal is also tied into blog-search and rating services like Technorati, and I'd like to get into that as well. There's a lot of question about how to get my archive uploaded (keep in mind that I have well over 2,000 entries now, going back to 1998) but going forward, the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
I have two quibbles with LiveJournal so far, one minor and one major. The major one will require an entry to itself. The minor one is simply the absurd limitations on user names. A user name may not contain spaces, and must be entirely in lower case. Good God, why? Are we still in the grip of that juvenile C programmer's tantrum against capital letters? And lest some nit ask, "Why would you want to do that?" (which means, "There isn't any reason you can't do that other than my own ego, so I have to turn the blame around to you so that I don't lose face") I will simply insist that "Jeff Duntemann" is how my name is spelled. I don't hide behind screen names. "jeff_duntemann" is a misspelling. Spaces are characters. Uppercase letters are characters. I am not e.e. cummings. (Nor e_e_cummings.)
Guys, this is just plain dumb.
I'll deal with the major quibble more thoughtfully, with some luck tomorrow.