LJ on a rampage

[likesgadgets]

Well, this is disturbing. LJ has taken upon itself the role of content policeman, removing offensive search terms from search databases and otherwise protecting us from all that is unseemly on the Internet

Comments

[gregordv]

It's things like that that made me decide to self-host my blog. Before I headed out to Iraq, I looked at LJ and blogspot and the rest, and was uncomfortable with what the future might bring with someone else being the _sole_ gatekeeper to my data. I thought my Iraq blog would be an important part of my life that I wanted to look back on, and I wondered what would happen if LJ just closed its doors (it was much younger then) and took all the blogs with it. I felt much safer hosting it somewhere where I controlled the source code, could make regular backups, and could at a whim move it to another computer.

Of course, I never quite got around to doing the regular backup thing and that lowest-bidder host's computer crashed six months later, taking all of my blog with it. Funny how things work out, isn't it?

I did learn my lesson, however. Now I have a nightly script that pulls my entire hosted site to my home network, then backs it up to a buddy's machine and Amazon's S3. Lesson learned: never depend on myself for critical redundancy. My MBTF is measured in time quanta.

There are some nice tools to help in the migration from LJ to WP, by the way.