Four years ago
It's my four year anniversary on LJ. I haven't remembered the date in time to post about it before now, though. I created this LJ back in the olden days, when you still needed an invite code to get in. The codes were going around Marysia's old Labyrinth board, and when it was my turn to get a code, I made the journal, not suspecting the large part it would play in my fandom life. Prior to LJ, fandoms resided on message boards and on usenet. There was little or no cross-fandom posting because everyone was still on dial-up, and you didn't waste people's time and money by posting off topic or you'd get a modly smack down and the oldbies would skewer you. ;)
Today's the perfect day to remember that history because last night I ran headlong into my own fandom entitlement issues. Since LJ's unsettling attitude regarding links, pr0n and suspension, shiv5468 and I have been pondering what to do about protecting the hgss_digest. We wanted to back it up, just in case, so we created a community on Insanejournal as a placeholder. We figured that should the digest get kicked off LJ, we'd start posting there. Then it occurred to me that the hgss_library would be in the same boat, so I created a duplicate library on Insanejournal, used LJ-Sec to copy all 854 entries (and then created five more as tag placeholders to make tagging easier). All well and good, right? Erm, no.
You see, the hgss_library is a wonderful thing as long as it's searchable. If you can't search it, it's just a very long list of unordered links. On LJ, you can use tags and memories to find anything in the library by author, title, status and genre. On Insanejournal, however, you're limited to 40 characters in the memory keywords, not just the standard limit of five keywords. ~sighs~ Considering that the last thing posted to the library used 61 characters, the memory option at Insanejournal is too limited for my purposes, and I can't find an indication that you can search past the last 100 entries used by each tag. (LJ expanded that to 1000 recently.)
Without the memories, mirroring the library on Insanejournal is pointless, and once I realized what was going on, I kicked the trashcan and ranted a bit. But what a change from the olden days, huh? Back then if you wanted to make a list of links, you went over to Geocities and created a free web page for it. There wasn't the option of having a searchable journal. ;)
So my entitlement issues and I have been pondering what to do. I'd considered del.icio.us for a bit, but you can't sort things alphabetically once you select your search parameters. Greatestjournal apparently has the same attitude as LJ about deleting journals, and I don't want to do all that work only to run the same risk of having it disappear. Oh, LJ, why do you have to be so perfect in same ways and so shitty in others?
Today's the perfect day to remember that history because last night I ran headlong into my own fandom entitlement issues. Since LJ's unsettling attitude regarding links, pr0n and suspension, shiv5468 and I have been pondering what to do about protecting the hgss_digest. We wanted to back it up, just in case, so we created a community on Insanejournal as a placeholder. We figured that should the digest get kicked off LJ, we'd start posting there. Then it occurred to me that the hgss_library would be in the same boat, so I created a duplicate library on Insanejournal, used LJ-Sec to copy all 854 entries (and then created five more as tag placeholders to make tagging easier). All well and good, right? Erm, no.
You see, the hgss_library is a wonderful thing as long as it's searchable. If you can't search it, it's just a very long list of unordered links. On LJ, you can use tags and memories to find anything in the library by author, title, status and genre. On Insanejournal, however, you're limited to 40 characters in the memory keywords, not just the standard limit of five keywords. ~sighs~ Considering that the last thing posted to the library used 61 characters, the memory option at Insanejournal is too limited for my purposes, and I can't find an indication that you can search past the last 100 entries used by each tag. (LJ expanded that to 1000 recently.)
Without the memories, mirroring the library on Insanejournal is pointless, and once I realized what was going on, I kicked the trashcan and ranted a bit. But what a change from the olden days, huh? Back then if you wanted to make a list of links, you went over to Geocities and created a free web page for it. There wasn't the option of having a searchable journal. ;)
So my entitlement issues and I have been pondering what to do. I'd considered del.icio.us for a bit, but you can't sort things alphabetically once you select your search parameters. Greatestjournal apparently has the same attitude as LJ about deleting journals, and I don't want to do all that work only to run the same risk of having it disappear. Oh, LJ, why do you have to be so perfect in same ways and so shitty in others?