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June 9th, 2008
09:43 pm - Now We Are Six
My LiveJournal is six today! Crikey, that's old. My most successful offline diary-keeping effort lasted a little over seven years and faded somewhat in frequency towards the end, so that might be an indication of how long it takes me to get bored.
My use of LJ remains disorganised; in conjunction with the long sets of day shifts and night shifts I work, it's far too easy for me to wake up, have a quick check of my Friends list, open five-to-fifteen interesting-looking comments pages without commenting to them, come back after work and add several more, then there's BBC News and all the other sites I check. Repeat for four or five days and, bang, suddenly I have 50 or 100 extra tabs to deal with. Sometimes I can make an attempt to clear dozens of them during the time I have off between sets of shifts, but it relies on me being in the right mood and real-life matters of housekeeping (or, dare I say it, leisure) not getting in the way. Plus, when the application you use most is a web browser, having to deal with a browser with dozens-to-grosses of tabs open is slow and wearing - yet I don't feel comfortable screaming and killing them all in a giant act of tabicide en masse, so to speak.
All too often it means that I end up replying to your posts, or even my posts, weeks or months after you've made them, simply because I've had the tab open that long. Now it may annoy the heck out of you to receive these long-delayed replies; if it does, this would be a good time to shout up. On the other hand, there are a good number of old posts I look at and think "Yeah, I sort of have something to say, but it's nothing particularly special, and the post is very old by now and the moment has passed... skip it." If you do receive a long-delayed reply, please take it as some sort of compliment that I think you'll not be driven crazy by a "better late than never" comment from me. It also tends to be the people who write the most by volume and by number of interesting posts - the ones whose blogs I most enjoy - who get disproportionately many late responses, simply because if you write a great post, I often want not to give you a less-than-thoughtful response.
This also knocks on into my posting practice; unless something really grabs me and I want to make a time-critical post, it's far too easy for me just to make a note, plus possibly a URL or two, to get around to later in a file I have called lj_temp.txt. Currently this is 2,441 lines long, with half a dozen quarter-written LJ posts, plus probably fifty or a hundred one-word pointers for things I vaguely want to post about at some point. It also includes all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with LJ; as this is the one text file I deal with most frequently, it's the best place to store things if I want to find them again quickly.
I like posting about "what I'm thinking about" rather than "what I'm doing", largely because so much of the time, what I'm doing is neither terribly interesting nor too far from routine. Conversely, I don't like posting about journalling, even though it seems to take up a disappointingly substantial proportion of what I post; if I'm thinking about journalling - and if I'm posting about it, then I am thinking about it - then I'm not getting on with the rest of my life. This meta-posting does not add to the sum of non-transient human knowledge in a way that my other posts might, possibly, on a good day.
It is traditional to grouse about the way LiveJournal has been run, particularly since the purchase by SUP last December. Whisper it very quietly, but other than the massive misstep with the removal of Basic accounts in March, and the horrible, horrible removal of some interests from being filtered, the new owners have otherwise been far from objectionable by virtue of all the changes they have made being for the better, at their best, and easy to ignore, at their worst.
Nevertheless, because LiveJournal is increasingly corporate, and because it is capable of massive blunders like those two, it is not cool. You might recall "No Content Day" back in March as a response to the removal of Basic accounts. Some people considered it "slacktivism" (a lovely neologism!) but in Soviet Russia, where the LiveJournal platform and blogging are so synonymous that there is no other word for "blog" than the local abbreviation for LJ, the one-day strike actually attained a reasonable degree of traction.
Shortly after the announcement of the removal of Basic accounts, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) synecdochic made this very interesting post about a putative journalling service that might come into existence some day, stressing how hypothetical the speculation was in a very knowing fashion. synecdochic openly admits to having been a LJ staff member in the past, clearly knows her onions technically and has a good grasp of the challenges of making such a service scaleable and thus financially stable in the long term. (Incidentally, I note that the intended owner/operator of Scribblit has recently found it all too much before the site got out of beta.) synecdochic also hints that an announcement, of unstated nature, might be coming this week. Watch that space.
Trying to head off some criticism at the pass, assuming that synecdochic is who I think she is, she is part of the LJ establishment who has been responsible for implementing some extremely unpopular decisions in the past. She implies passim that she has not necessarily agreed with all the policies that she has had to implement in the past, though this has not stopped her implementing them. With this in mind, it will be interesting to see what policies she (and her co-workers...) might choose to implement in the future when she does have a greater degree of agency and can take more aggressive decisions regarding the desirable extent of backwards compatibility.
The question of how you should regard someone who knows the failings of a policy but nevertheless implements it is an open one, and I have done some dishonest things to web site users in the past that I've hated doing by virtue of "I was only following orders". This is a matter of a grey scale - as has been pointed out elsewhere, an extreme application of this pings Godwin's Law - but I am definitely more on the side of the jobsworths than most. And yet...
The strangest thing about the LiveJournal Advisory Board election is the way that it has made me feel socially conservative like very few - if, possibly, any - things ever have done in the past. I am not used to feeling that someone, or some sense of humour, or some sense of values, is as instinctively and innately worth opposing as I felt about that election. I'm not used to having those sorts of feelings and I don't feel comfortable having them. Perhaps I'm just growing old.
Should a new journalling site ever come to fruition that seems to sufficiently meet the description "LJ done properly", I would give serious consideration to moving across, especially as I perceive some degree of will among movers and shakers to moving across that I haven't perceived before with other projects. I do agree with this point by bateleur that the value of LJ is in the interaction tools and I have made the point myself that Metcalfe's law points us all in the direction of staying on one site rather than spreading ourselves out to the four winds. However, this development has tantalising prospects: genuinely interesting (i.e., not Vox) new functionality, owners who might bring back the spirit of when-it-was-cool-before-I-joined-it LiveJournal in the site's development and policies, better-than-OpenID interaction with other sites and maybe, just maybe, a userbase which doesn't make ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) ohnotheydidnt about as representative a community (and, thus, sense of humour) of the site as anything else.
It's interesting to follow non-LJ blogs and compare them to LJ ones. The non-LJ ones seem to be missing those things that I think I would miss if mine were a non-LJ blog less than I thought they would do. Syndicated feeds aren't perfect, sometimes by accident and sometimes by design, but they work adequately for most purposes. OpenID is gaining wider acceptance; I've seen criticism of the system in the past, but am afraid that I am not yet convinced against the system's utility. (I am very probably far closer to not understanding the criticism properly than I am to understanding the criticism properly and regarding it as a price worth paying. Sadly it will probably take me suffering a loss of some sort through use of OpenID to make the point clear to me.)
Similarly, this criticism of increased online social connection is interesting, though sadly does not spell out the potential abuses it rails against clearly enough to immediately convince me that this is a practical problem rather than just a theoretical one.
At the risk of barking up the wrong tree, I wonder whether it's worth drawing a parallel to the question of circumstances under which freedom of speech, or more specifically publication, can reasonably be considered not to be in the public interest. Again, I may be being more confused than usual here, but it has been suggested that even though the traditional caste system in Japan has long been outlawed, there are still some black market publications which permit someone unethical to take a prejudiced opinion on someone based solely on their name and place of origin. Is this an example of a possible undesirable consequence when information becomes too free? (Yeah, I think I've lost track of my point a bit here; I really don't understand the other point of view that I'm trying to take on board and am hoping that one of you who understands it better than I do will explain it to me.)
A part of the problem is that I (uneducatedly) subscribe to similar fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding WordPress and other installed-on-your-server blogging software as I do with regard to Linux; specifically, in the arms race of security vs. abuse, as a user you need to keep up-to-date in order to beat a considerable force who seek to misuse your resources, which requires proper understanding. With Windows, it's not so hard; keep applying the updates, stick on a firewall and anti-virus software and you're most of the way there. I'm prepared to suffer a lot of indignities and technical shortcomings; I am prepared to settle for "merely good enough", rather than the very best, and "merely good enough" in theory is perfectly adequate in practice. Just how consumptive of time, effort and emotion is it to keep a Linux installation or a WordPress installation up to date in practice?
In practice, I suspect that the status quo will prevail and I'll keep doing what I've long been doing; seldom can change be more convenient than maintaining the staus quo and I don't think this is one of those circumstances. In the past I've thought about starting something specific to talk about games without wearing a LiveJournal hat; the idea still appeals, but it all relies on me getting more serious about writing, and I'm not sure I can afford to make that a high priority at the moment. So here's to another six years!
Poll #1202262 Quick tabbed browsing poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllCounting all the browsers on all the computers you consider yours, how many tabs (or windows) do you have open in total at this moment in time?
Poll #1202263 Slightly less quick tabbed browsing poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllCounting all the browsers on all the computers you consider yours, roughly how many tabs (or windows) do you usually have open at any one time? Counting all the browsers on all the computers you consider yours, what is the largest number of tabs (or windows) you have ever had open at any one time most likely to have been? Any other comments? (If you type "ticky" in, does it become a tickybox?)
Because it's an even birthday, I permit myself to update this:
Top Commenters on jiggery_pokery's LiveJournal
(2,642 of my own comments excluded from rankings)
Total Commenters: 338 (238 not shown)
Total Comments: 8914
Report generated 09/06/2008 08:36:04 by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.7
Comparing this chart with the one from two years ago, I can try to work out who's been commenting most over the last two years.
The uncertainty arises when people have moved from outside the overall top 100 to inside it. (For instance, could be that the likes of lathany and devjoe, among others, might make it onto the next list in the same way.) I'm pretty sure I've got a handle on name changes and the like. Nice to see second, fourth and ninth places (at least!) all unchanged from last time, but it's telling that the number of comments required to get into the top ten is so much lower than it was two years ago. I'm posting much less, obviously, and I may just be posting less to respond to. It's interesting to see who hasn't commented here even once in the last two years; sure, we know about some people stopping using their journals, but perhaps it's an indication of who still has me Friended but no longer reads me? ;-) Today is Defriending Amnesty Day; every day is Defriending Amnesty Day!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/optimistic.gif) old
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Comments:
I shut down my work computer every night (there was a fire in the office not long before I started and they're over-cautious about this kind of thing); otherwise the number of open tabs would be somewhere around 30 most of the time. I actually shut 9 tabs just before refreshing my Friends page, too...
In my case the difference from top spot over the last two years is probably more to do with the emergence of undyingking as a superpower rather than any real change to my own habits.
By some sort of curious symmetry, you are the #1 commenter on my LJ, and jiggery_pokery is the #10.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/32948976/570854) | | From: | frayer |
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| Date: | June 9th, 2008 09:28 pm (UTC) |
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I was generally saddened by the election. I didn't feel that fandom's candidate conducted herself in a manner befitting someone who was essentially handed the election, and I certainly didn't like her friends going "WELL SHE HAS A RIGHT TO DO THAT! I KNOW HER, SHE'S NICE, VOTE FOR HER!".
I ended up doing the equivolent of voting for the Lib Dems and voting for the Greens.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/5537227/899098) | | From: | imc |
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| Date: | June 11th, 2008 01:52 pm (UTC) |
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didn't feel that fandom's candidate conducted herself in a manner befitting someone who was essentially handed the election
I haven't been paying a lot of attention so I'm not sure what it is you are referring to, but I'm aware that she has locked down her journal. I'm not particularly happy with that, but I gather that during the election she received a threatening message which "included personal information about [her] and was sent specifically to warn [her] to drop out of the race" and I wonder if that is the explanation.
I certainly hope the whole thing isn't now going to be conducted in secret.
| | From: | frayer |
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| Date: | June 12th, 2008 08:18 am (UTC) |
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Yeah. I pretty much feel that if your life is in danger to the point it scares you from any interaction with LJers you don't know, your life is in danger sufficiently that you stop your friends claiming that fandomers have a moral imperative to vote for you. Either you won't be cowed or you feel you're in sufficient danger that you feel the election isn't worth risking your life. The half way house of refusing to answer questions and criticisms but continuing campaigning is just odd. As much as jameth was generally decried for the way his supporters behaved, I have to say that I saw equally unacceptable (though different) behaviour from people that really, I consider to have been round long enough to know better. Essentially, the early polarising of the election made it descend into a farce. And it makes me sad that the group of people I identify with on LJ is incapable of doing anything without it descending into a farce.
While I wouldn't put it to that extent - there's still a lot of supposition going on - I feel rather more sympathy for your point of view than makes me feel entirely comfortable.
I selected 28-81 for all answers because I usually hover around 40-50. I have the Tab Mix plus extension, which allows you to have stacked tabs (I do max 7 rows before the rows scroll), and has a GREAT session recovery, so I rarely, if ever, have to worry about losing tabs.
I primarily use my tabs for opening fic (or some other fandom medium) to read later and save in del.icio.us (if I want to bookmark it). Though I do use tabs to read my flist if there is a post behind a cut or post I want to read more carefully or links I click off a post. I try not to use to for commenting, because I will forget and the moment will have passed for me. (also, do not have any problem with "late" comments. I'm always glad to receive comments! <3)
I may start having separate windows open for fic and such though, so I can have a "Fandom" window and a "flist/general interet" window, and so on.
Tab Mix Plus may actually be slightly more exciting than all of the transport developments in my next post. :-)
My "Max number of rows to display" is set at 14, because I did find myself having to increase it from 12 for a bad couple of weeks. Combine this with lowering the minimum tab width to 22 pixels (at which point you can see the site's favicon only, but that's enough - just hover over the tab to see its title) and you can see how, at worst, I did get up to about 340-350 tabs. It was horrible. :-D
When it was at its worst, Meg sometimes looked in at my browser window and wondered how I could ever see any content because apparently a third to a half of the window was taken up with row after row of tabs...
Didn't it take approximately forever to open up and shut down Firefox? Mine takes a good couple of minutes to populate all the tabs, and that's only with 30-40.
Not far off - and then, having restarted Firefox, you then want to reload all the tabs in case they've changed. Accordingly I tried very hard not to reboot at all frequently, and that made things e v e n s l o w e r .
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/11426302/922444) | | From: | trebro |
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| Date: | June 9th, 2008 10:52 pm (UTC) |
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Eh, I was not happy with LJ when it got to the end of six apart, but part of that was them not saying a lot about the whys and the hows.
I use blogger for my photoblog because I don't want ads. Otherwise, it would totally be a second LJ. I don't want to pay another $25 a year for 2 journals. But I did have Erica make it a feed for LJ for those who are on here.
The fact is, LJ keeps me in touch with people in a way that those who don't have LJs (and even those who have other blogs) does not. It seems that way for most of us who have stayed the course (5 years plus for me now). On top of it, LJ also seems to be the best place for all-over-the-map bloggers like you and I. Other places seem to cater to the more specialized writer. I could be wrong on that, but that's the way it seems to me.
I have been considering the pros and cons of LJ versus a self installed blogging system Like WordPress. I loved WP when I used it; it was neatly written, easy to edit and add new features, safe and secure (as far as I'm aware), and generally a pleasure to use. And, oh, SQL databases, you fill my heart with joy!
But even then, I never loved my blog like I loved LJ. I think the LJ friends page is the real stroke of genius (particularly as you can now have RSS feeds on it), as it has all the blogs you could want to read in one place, and it can be accessed from any computer. The communities are a big part of the appeal too, as not only a place to post/discuss but also as somewhere to meet like-minded people. I just don't know of any other blogging service that offers those features like LJ does.
Certainly, I am less than thrilled with the LJ management, but I am yet to see their silly decisions have any real effect on me or my blogging. But then I wasn't around for strikethrough, and I know that changed a lot of people's opinions regarding LJ for good. Oh, and the election was ludicrous. But I love LJ for its social network, and that's something a personal blog has never quite captured for me.
Happy Birthday!
You just reminded me that mine turned 6 yesterday!
(even though I do not update it any more)
Nice to know you're still around, and I hope life is treating you kindly. Happy birthday, very-slightly-elder bordering-on-twin blog sister!
Many happy returns of the journaling day!
Resolves to work harder - at critiquing the British guy's view of the difference between sport and games - in the future.
Slow and steady, I always say. Consistency, consistency, consistency. Why, that almost make me British...or something.
I wonder what the percentages look like and if that is calculable without a lot more effort? i.e. What is the ranking for the percent of posts that an individual posted to rather than total posts. So, I could come in and post twice a year, but have a continuing conversation on that one post and put 30 comments and replies in one rather than the continuous blathering I do in almost every one of your LJ posts. Kind of like this comment... :)
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/41466604/5005340) | | From: | matgb |
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| Date: | June 10th, 2008 05:44 pm (UTC) |
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synecdochic is rahaeli's personal/fandom account, and she's been fairly open about not liking the direction LJ was going for some time now, it was fairly apparent before she left. I was planning on working on a Wordpress MU system that could be distributed with different people having different servers. But that project got back burnered a few years back and I never got back to it (Iain's private blog is the using some of the basics but the distributed aggregator system isn't in place yet). I like OpenID in that it's as secure as my server or ID is—I can comment on a large number of blogs, have access to stuff that's privacy locked, and it's no less likely to get hacked than my individual account, say, here. Need to empty some tabs in order to follow your links, may comment again later.
| | From: | imc |
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| Date: | June 11th, 2008 02:07 pm (UTC) |
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Yes, I'd heard the name synecdochic before and noted that it seemed to be a reasonably intelligent person, but hadn't worked out who it is until yesterday when I read the above journal entry (indeed, it hadn't really occurred to me that I needed to work out who it was). She copped a lot of flak as head of abuse, much or all of it almost certainly undeserved. She seems to be generally a cool person. I'll note though, that she is the person who argued in favour of LiveJournal keeping its breakdown of account types secret on the grounds that publishing it would give ammunition to LiveJournal's competitors (though maybe only because she was obliged to follow the party line, I guess). I never quite understood why, and I tried to push her on that at least once. I don't really think I'd switch to an alternative service, even if it were run by the coolest people on earth, unless the climate on LiveJournal got a lot worse. I have a lot invested here, including a bunch of nice friends and a permanent account.
| | From: | matgb |
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| Date: | June 11th, 2008 09:38 pm (UTC) |
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I have a lot invested here My plan, such as it as, was to no atually leave, but host my man content myself and crosspost with gadgets to make things work as per LJ—a lot of my friends are very happy here—I'm obviously happy, but it's not as good as it could, or should, be, and the management, although palpably better now than under 6A/Danga sill leaves a lot to be desired. Ideally I'd like to see several different nodal 'journalling' platforms, all interoperable, with the ability to self host either just one person or several easily. With the LJ APIs, OpenID and a few tweaks it should be more than possible, and there are already Wordpress plugins that crosspost to LJ/IJ/Journalfen while still allowing for privacy options and similar. But life got in the way for both myself and foxfirefey a year back and we sortof stopped, most recent post is last August: http://matgb.livejournal.com/tag/lj2wordpressIf an OpenID account from elsewhere can be linked with a feed, and/or crossposting becomes really easy, and friends pages can be replicated using auth=digest, etc we could get somewhere fairly quickly. I always found D to be the most receptive of the staff re issues with the possible exception of Abe, and she was always very constructive re: no_lj_ads which was one of the best of the meta-comms. If it's her project (and the way she talks involves serious money and backup, brad?) then I think she'd be much better than as a rep for a management team she didn't see eye-to-eye with. We'll see I guess—she talks about interopereabilty. That would be very good.
Ooh, you earn tons of points for linking back to her feedback Q&A session. I would like to think that her 2008 self would have liked to have got in touch with her 2006 self and got everything Dreamwidth started two years earlier.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/1527879/532617) | | From: | lathany |
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| Date: | June 10th, 2008 07:41 pm (UTC) |
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Your no. 1 spot does not surprise me!
(My bid to make it onto next time's list)
| | From: | imc |
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| Date: | June 11th, 2008 01:47 pm (UTC) |
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horrible removal of some interests from being filtered You seem to have meant "horrible removal of some interests from the popular interests page. Some time after that, the filter was removed, but I am assuming you meant that the filter was horrible, not its removal. (Am I the only person who doesn't know what "yaoi" is?)
| | From: | matgb |
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| Date: | June 11th, 2008 09:41 pm (UTC) |
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7 (11.3%)
259