Comments | pphaneuf: Long time no see?

pphaneuf

Long time no see?

Feb 07, 2009 19:42

I really should write more, be it here, or elsewhere, no matter. I should be saying more about myself, not really because people need to know (well, ok, some people do!), I used to be so public and saying everything to the four winds, and now I feel a bit closed and inaccessible. I'm not sure why it turned out that way, but I have some good ideas, ( Read more... )

love, sex, dream, introspection, psyche, meta

Comments 10

jbailey February 8 2009, 04:41:38 UTC

I've been finding LJ less useful as a community lately. I've been thinking of moving my blog to some other setup (possibly blogger). I don't read that many restricted posts anymore - I think as my friends are all crawling our way out of our 20's we're just not likely to post something that the world can't see.

At that point, why bother keeping the account?

pphaneuf February 8 2009, 09:18:33 UTC

Oh, I agree that as a community, it's been superseded by Facebook, mostly. I don't have much impetus for actually moving, as this would entail, you know, work, but with the Russians being wacky, I wouldn't be surprised if I had to make a run for it (backed it up, we'll see)...

I do have a number of friends who only have restricted posts (me, I never had much in the way of restricted posts, ever).

What I mean is, I've got accounts from a zillion sites that I never use, why is this so special that you have to make a conscious effort of abandonment by hitting the kill switch? It reeks of "screw you guys, I'm going home" more than of quietly getting past that period, no?

scjody February 8 2009, 21:55:33 UTC

I dunno, I have quite a few friends (in their 30s if not very late 20s) who still post lots of restricted entries... I think a lot of it has got to do with "not working in the computer industry" and the worry that an employer might google them and find out that they're not the sliced white bread corporate conformist that they claimed to be on their resumé...

Plus Google Reader still fails at dealing with authenticated RSS and third party workarounds are... lacking. Hmm, if I ever have time, I could hack together a workaround in appengine. But that's even less likely than Google fixing Reader.

pphaneuf February 8 2009, 22:52:48 UTC

Hmm, it'd be quite easy to do a workaround in App Engine, that's not a bad idea at all! Obfuscated URLs and possibly a check on the User-Agent ought to be enough to make it annoying for would-be evildoers...

scjody February 8 2009, 21:35:01 UTC

I can sort of understand deleting your account if it's an addiction... then it's actually hard to read your friends' entries, reply to comments, etc.

I say "sort of" because I don't understand how anyone could get addicted to LJ/blogging/facebook/the intertubes to that point. But I know lots of people who are, so I know it happens :)

pphaneuf February 8 2009, 22:54:12 UTC

I think that's the best explanation. Considering how (not) often I post, I think I'm fairly safe from the LiveJournal addiction. ;-)

scjody February 8 2009, 21:37:46 UTC

And yeah, I should post more, and am also thinking of splitting my blog into two - and if I do that, they might as well both be wordpress or blogger. LJ kinda fails as a modern blogging site, and a friends list is no longer adequate to keep up on all the blogs I want to read. I only use it because some of my friends DO post friends-locked posts, and Google Reader STILL doesn't support that.

pphaneuf February 8 2009, 23:01:05 UTC

For all its failing, LJ is one of the few hosted blogging service that both have threaded comments and decent Atom feeds. The latter, you might not care much about, but threaded comments are kind of nice (azrhey is, uh, "strongly encouraging" me to work on Blogger as a 20% to do that, heh!). I've long ago given up on reading stuff right on LJ, it's Google Reader and NetNewsWire for the win here.

If you even set up new blogs, I'd recommend not hosting Wordpress youself. I read enough of Wordpress' and PHP's code, as well as the steady stream of CVEs concerning them, that it's one of the few combinations of software that I wouldn't sleep so well at night having to maintain myself. It's probably fine on wordpress.com, just make it someone else's problem!

scjody February 9 2009, 22:12:41 UTC

True, the threaded comments are really nice compared to most other blogs... but so much else about the site smacks of 5 years ago to me. Like no trackbacks...

And there's no way I'm hosting Wordpress. I don't host _anything_ these days - my stuff is here, on Flickr, and on Google Apps (mail, calendar, sites.) Hosting your own stuff is for people who like pain and spending money.

pphaneuf February 9 2009, 22:21:26 UTC

Trackbacks are kind of icky (sometimes spammy, I see little use of them out there), but Blogger has some "links to related blog posts" feature that seem to hook in through search. I don't see why Wordpress wouldn't have something similar (although it might be in a plugin).

I see we share the same opinion about hosting. :-)

Only has QServ left on my small server at my place (http://ludusdesign.com/cgi-bin/qserv.pl moving to http://qserv.appspot.com/qserv/ when we manage to release Quadra 1.2)...