I'm not back yet...
I've not been absent just because my PC's dead.
I mean, the dead PC isn't helping. My netbook is fine, but I'd rather have a PC for extended work... And I have a huge backlog of photos building up.
(Nothing new there then!)
But the penultimate note here before my PC broke was about plans for this year, and I just wanted to mention those now.
Because they may well impact how I'll be using LiveJournal.
Basically, I'm not sure what I'll be doing about LJ. I'm doing a rethink of all my various web properties this year - my website, Flickr, Dreamwidth, blogs, the lot.
I spend quite a bit across the board on these, yet don't seem to use them. So I'm thinking of making some changes that will make using them much more efficient.
One of those changes is that I'll be moving my website to new website hosting, and rebuilding the whole thing in a CMS - probably Drupal. That will make it easier to update, and easier to add features.
Like blogging.
LJ is probably fairly safe, as I'm lucky to have a permanent account - so it doesn't cost me anything to keep using LJ. And I only use LJ for some of my blogging, not all of it, as it offers some decent security options.
But when considering such things, a more fundamental issue of my online presence crops up - that of which services I use at all.
For example, I'm not using Facebook much these days.
(Not that I ever did.)
Drupal allows me to create accounts and let people see private posts just as easily as LJ does. And don't worry about not wanting another account - you could log into my website with an OpenID provider, like LJ or Facebook, so you wouldn't need to remember another username and password. Which would be handy...
The only real problem is that such a (rather drastic) change is visibility - that users of LJ or Facebook might not see things, because they're not going to drop by my site. RSS solves that partially, but not completely if I'm using your accounts to secure posts, as your RSS reader may not support the login, which means you'd only see public items.
Another issue which occurs to me is that I've always liked to split my life into different sections. Some of my friends don't share my interests - be they technical, artistic or refreshingly beverage based - so I had dedicated blogs or systems for different purposes. Some of which were used more than others.
Mono and LJ were for more personal or private material, with LJ also being my public blog. Dreamwidth was for artistic endeavours. And so on, and so forth.
Theoretically, I could do most of those on one website now as well. Even if I wanted to have three separate blogs, I could still host them all on the one site, just as separate sections with their own RSS feeds and so forth.
So technology aside, I'm having some long hard moments of thought on how I divide - or merge - my online personas.
Anyway, it's all very complex and it's requiring some time.
And a new PC would be handy, too. But mostly at the moment I'm just letting you know I'm in the planning stages of changes, which are coming along quite nicely.
See you in a while!
I mean, the dead PC isn't helping. My netbook is fine, but I'd rather have a PC for extended work... And I have a huge backlog of photos building up.
(Nothing new there then!)
But the penultimate note here before my PC broke was about plans for this year, and I just wanted to mention those now.
Because they may well impact how I'll be using LiveJournal.
Basically, I'm not sure what I'll be doing about LJ. I'm doing a rethink of all my various web properties this year - my website, Flickr, Dreamwidth, blogs, the lot.
I spend quite a bit across the board on these, yet don't seem to use them. So I'm thinking of making some changes that will make using them much more efficient.
One of those changes is that I'll be moving my website to new website hosting, and rebuilding the whole thing in a CMS - probably Drupal. That will make it easier to update, and easier to add features.
Like blogging.
LJ is probably fairly safe, as I'm lucky to have a permanent account - so it doesn't cost me anything to keep using LJ. And I only use LJ for some of my blogging, not all of it, as it offers some decent security options.
But when considering such things, a more fundamental issue of my online presence crops up - that of which services I use at all.
For example, I'm not using Facebook much these days.
(Not that I ever did.)
Drupal allows me to create accounts and let people see private posts just as easily as LJ does. And don't worry about not wanting another account - you could log into my website with an OpenID provider, like LJ or Facebook, so you wouldn't need to remember another username and password. Which would be handy...
The only real problem is that such a (rather drastic) change is visibility - that users of LJ or Facebook might not see things, because they're not going to drop by my site. RSS solves that partially, but not completely if I'm using your accounts to secure posts, as your RSS reader may not support the login, which means you'd only see public items.
Another issue which occurs to me is that I've always liked to split my life into different sections. Some of my friends don't share my interests - be they technical, artistic or refreshingly beverage based - so I had dedicated blogs or systems for different purposes. Some of which were used more than others.
Mono and LJ were for more personal or private material, with LJ also being my public blog. Dreamwidth was for artistic endeavours. And so on, and so forth.
Theoretically, I could do most of those on one website now as well. Even if I wanted to have three separate blogs, I could still host them all on the one site, just as separate sections with their own RSS feeds and so forth.
So technology aside, I'm having some long hard moments of thought on how I divide - or merge - my online personas.
Anyway, it's all very complex and it's requiring some time.
And a new PC would be handy, too. But mostly at the moment I'm just letting you know I'm in the planning stages of changes, which are coming along quite nicely.
See you in a while!