Lj

I’ve decided that I finally was sick enough of LiveJournal that I’d move the sporadic blogging I did to my own domain. LiveJournal was fun, but more and more I’m not a fan of having my data on other people’s systems (especially as I have my own), and I haven’t been a fan of the charities that LJ’s been encouraging people to donate to lately. So, now I have WordPress set up here with me having control over my own data, and perhaps it’ll encourage me to post something a little more often. Or maybe not.

This is my 500th entry on LiveJournal.

Over the last 4½ years, I’ve discussed topics ranging from the controversial to the trivial. During that time, I finished school, built a house, and had a baby, among other things.

I’m still not completely sure what I’m getting out of sporadically posting on LJ, but it does seem to be useful and fun.

So, LJ has recently announced a new feature where you can categorize your posts with tags, which people can then use to find related items and such. It seems like a nice idea. So, I’ve gone through a lot of my postings and added some tags that might help. Let me know if you think that some additional categorization of my postings might be helpful.

Some of you may have noticed that I’m still posting to LJ, despite my threat to move to Blogger. Basically, cross-site blog reading just isn’t quite there yet. Maybe someday RSS will be working perfectly with everyone able to use it, but that day isn’t today.

Also, one of my annoyances with LJ was the lack of being able to track the discussions without constantly checking the site. You see, when first signing on to LJ, I unchecked the “Get message board replies” option. This option says “Check this if you want to get e-mail updates when people reply to your journal entries using the message boards (comments).” My problem wasn’t really with checking the comments on my posts, but on the replies to my comments on other people’s posts. So, I never tried the option. But I tried it starting about a week ago and have discovered that it does, in fact, email you when someone replies to a comment you leave on someone else’s post. Had the description of the option said that, I would have tried that much sooner, and been much happier with LJ.

I ranted on this a little when I first started using LJ, and I’ve mentioned things here and there that bothered me, and some of the things that bothered me got fixed. So, I figured that I’d put my current comprehensive list in one place:

• While the Friends List aggregates people’s posts, it doesn’t do a good job of showing me what entries and comments are not yet read… I have to wade through the list to find what might interest me, and if there are any unread comments.
• The spell checker doesn’t understand contractions.
• The spell checker doesn’t understand HTML.
• The spell checker doesn’t understand UTF-8 (which is the default). That is, if you type anything that’s not in the ASCII 128-character set, it confuses the spell-checker.
• Journal entries display local time (Eastern); comments display server time (Pacific).
• The update journal form sets the time by default to the time that you start updating. I’d prefer it to simply puts in the server time of the time that you post it if you don’t specify a time to override it with. Sometimes I’ll spend hours between starting a post and finishing it because I’m doing other things, and then I sometimes write about those things I’m doing, but each time I finish writing a post I have to go set the time on it to the current time.
• There’s no way for a visitor to ask a question and/or start a conversation topic on “my” page… Visitors can only comment on what I’ve started. While I’d certainly want this to be an optional feature, there’s something here that seems missing. There’s no easy search feature to grep through your journal (not that I saw, anyway, while trying to construct this post)

Maybe the way I want LJ to work just isn’t how the rest of the world does. Although, for some parts that I want to be different, I don’t have a good description of what it is exactly that I want to change. Perhaps I should look at some of the other logging sites out there to see if I like one of them better. (Google recently launched one.)

Well, I know that I haven’t been using this for very long, but I already think that their interface is suboptimal.

• While the Friends List aggregates people’s posts, it doesn’t do a good job of showing me what entries and comments are not yet read… I have to wade through the list to find what might interest me, and if there are any unread comments.
• I want some connection between comments I leave on other people’s pages and on my entries here… I reply to something somewhere else that made me think of something, but I kinda want to crosspost it to a journal entry as it’s of general interest and what I am thinking at the time. Plus, if I have something to say in a comment somewhere, there’s a possibility that it won’t really get seen by people who don’t check the comments pages of my friends. Something just seems off here, and I’m not really sure what it is or what the solution is.
• There’s no link from my journal for me to post to it.
• The spell checker doesn’t understand contractions
• Journal entries display local time (Eastern); comments display server time (Pacific).
• There’s no preview-post feature for journal entries, although there is for comments
• Web pages are not valid HTML (just a minor pet peeve)
• And that’s just what I’ve found in half a day.

I want things to work more like my mail/newsreader, where only unread messages are seen, and threaded, and all my inbound communications is in one place.

Now that I think about it more, one of the main convincing reason for me to try this out was ‘s comment about how it helps keep in touch with people that you don’t see often, letting them see a synopsis of what’s going on.

Well, I’ve decided that enough people think that this is a useful tool for keeping up to date on each other that I figure I’ll try it, at least for a while. Perhaps this journal will become a continuing quest to discover exactly what its usefulness is.

Although, I’m starting to see it. Not quite, but I can start to see why people find it popular, although some aspects (current music? separate clients?) still baffle me.