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My Beloved made an interesting point tonight. A friend of ours got some unexpected attention on his non-LJ blog when he ranted about a particularly clueless doctor and a bunch of mundanes wandered past and proceeded to side with the doctor over him. My Beloved commented to the effect that, if you blog, sooner or later you attract the attention of total futtocks who seem to forget that they're dealing with human beings. And therefore, she opined, the only people who can stand to blog for any length of time are the ones with really, really thick skins.

I, obviously, am one of these.

So, opening it up to the Galleria della Peanutti: what do you say? Is it possible to put yourself out there on teh intarwobs and blog in public without developing a hide like a Kryptonian hippopotamus? Or does the endless tide of drivel eventually lead all but the real thickies (like me) to hang up their keyboards and go do something less confrontational? Is it possible to get criticised, unfairly or otherwise, on a blog without wanting to go hide in a cupboard? Can one disconnect one's perception of humanity from one's experience with the limited subset who spew their alphanumeric pukery onto one's text boxes? Or does the sheer volume of cluelessness turn everyone away in the end?

What say you?

Tried doing the book meme (bold the ones you've read, etc) but LJ's immortally braindead Rich Text formatting widget decided to strike-through every item.  I don't care enough to go and re-edit.  Suffice to say that most of what was there was tripe, and Jane Austen should have gotten out more and had more sex and spent less time writing.

Posted an entry on the 27th, and it's not appearing in the calendar on the side of my page.  I wonder why...  Bug in LJ, perhaps?

Testing... testing...

Edit: and now it is.  Weird.  I don't trust this software as far as I could throw it.  Remind me to do another backup using ljArchive just in case it all goes down for no reason...

LJ now has a "Ban [user] from commenting in your journal" option. Thank the gods! Pardon me while I sweep out any and every comment by a certain brain-addled cluephobe from my LJ. I don't have time to put up with the level of stupid he generates.

Nobody's posted anything to my friends page in six hours? That seems... implausible.

If you can read this, all my friends are off being productive. If not, LJ is probably ill...

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Interesting. It timed out saving this, but it posted anyway. I suspect something is up, but I don't know what.

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Nope, it was probably just a problem with the net connection at work. Not unheard of; they use Netspeed, and therefore TransACT, one of the more incompetent ISPs in the country.

Have a guess what my one-and-only New Year's Resolution is. I wonder how long it will last...

(Incidentally, if you're in a different timezone than Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time (AEDT), the calendar may have gaps; I'm not sure. There are definitely days where I didn't post for more than a 24-hour stretch -- say one at half-past midnight and the next at 11:30pm the day after. So let me know if the foolish consistency is absent for you: I'm curious to see how that works.)

I have to unscreen anonymous comments, because I get sick of spam. (Oddly, for a while there I was only getting comment spam on one entry, the filk of Chris de Burgh's Don't Pay The Ferryman. Why? Buggered if I know. Spammers are retarded.) So when someone I like posts a comment on my LJ, nobody gets to see it until I unscreen it. This is, of course, suboptimal for all concerned. The solution is to get your own LJ -- a free one will do -- and let me know so I can friend you. Then you can comment without pain.

I'm pleased that a certain Bilby is now LJ-enabled, as infoaddict. She took a lot of convincing! She needs to do one post, though, possibly with links to her "real" blogs, so that people can contact her by commenting on it.

So now it's Kilian's turn. Considering the extra hassle of unscreening and CAPTCHAs, it makes sense for anyone who comments on LJ regularly to get themselves an account. You don't have to start blogging! Honest! Granted only two people on my friends list have exclusively posting-free LJs (auntyyolly being the other) but the theory is sound!

So, Kilian: hows about you get online at last? The name kilian is taken already, but I'm sure you could try lady_kilian (if you're not planning to ever get a peerage), the_amazing_kilian (if modesty is not one of your vices) or even amazingly_cute_redhead_chickybabe_kilian (because - come on, it's true!).

ETA: Mission accomplished! Say hello to ms_kilian! Long may she comment!

You can edit LJ comments now? How long has that been available? Shiny!

Just checking to see if I can still blog from my phone, after changing my passwords.

Tuggeranong Parkway, last Thursday, on the 749 from Woden

With recent random bullying by the evil megacorporation Six Apart, it makes sense to have a contingency plan for escaping LJ.  Skud has produced a series on exactly that topic, with the final installment posted today.  Go check it out.  If you’re looking for a friendly blog host, I’m available - but so is WordPress, and they’re probably a little more customer focused in the medium term.

Crossposted from fLog.

WordPress is an interesting blogging system. Much better designed than ImmovableTrype, of course, but that’s probably because of the whole Perl-vs-the-reality-based-community dichotomy more than anything. So much more fully-featured than the mid-nineties stagnation that is LiveJournal. (You can actually control how it works! If you want a new feature, you can get it! You don’t have to wait for some talentless bunch of cretins to get around to implementing it! But I digress.)

The only problem, really, is the relative lack of support for WordPress MU, the multi-blog version. Since I plan to have a minimum of three blogs on here (for me, the Beloved and the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM), plus a bunch of extra blogs I’m planning to host for the local SCA barony, I needed something better than the default WordPress, which required a complete copy of the 2-odd megabytes of code for each separate blog. WPMU gives you the ability to achieve that, but there are some downsides. For example, the plug-in I use to handle cross-posting to LJ doesn’t know about WPMU, so I had to disable all plug-ins for every other blog or else they too would be able to post to my LJ. No doubt I can find an alternative that will work properly in this situation, but it will take some digging.

Anyhow, if you’re reading this at the actual blog rather than in the LJ mirror or an RSS reader, you’ll see I’ve got some styles set up to look more or less like the rest of flurf.net, including known IE bugs. It’s all a work in progress, so don’t be alarmed if it’s a bit flakey. I’m sure I’ll fix it in my Copious Free Time.

Crossposted from fLog.

This is test #7. I keep forgetting to set the “To LJ” category before I click Publish. Twit!

Now: what happens when I edit and save? Does it crosspost the changes? That would be too cunning, I think.

Heh - turns out it does, pretty much perfectly.  Only one gotcha: don’t post an entry from the WordPress end and then delete it from the LJ end.  WordPress will steadfastly refuse to let you edit it or delete it from then on!  I eventually had to disable the plug-in to stop it strangling my database.  All better now.

Crossposted from fLog.

The Mighty God King returns! In his own WordPress installation, on his own domain name. Let the wanktards of LJ issue take-down notices to their PANTS, godsdammit!

Now, if we can just get a dump of a certain Wizard's LJ, and I'll happily host it myself so he doesn't have to put up with his own brand of stupid authoritarian bullshit...

Several of my friends (and Friends) have cats that are sick, dying, getting run over by a steamroller on its way to a mattress commercial, &c &c et al. And yet our cat remains stubbornly alive, crapping on the carpet and howling with anger at not being fed immediately after she's been fed. No sign of cat death here. How is that fair?

Right, now I can tick off "Talk About My Cat" on the List Of Things To Do On LJ. Now what's left... hmmm... I've done a sufficient quantity of "What Piece Of Polystyrene Scenery From Space 1999 Are You?" memes, and plenty of LOLCats, and of course "How Much You Like The Job You Just Started" and "How Much You Hate The Job You've Had For A Month" are done and dusted. I guess there's just "God I'm Depressed" (which I'm not) and "Quantum Leap Slash Fan Fiction" left to do (which -- no).

Hey Chris! The Wayback Machine, aka the Internet Archive, has some of your older stuff, but (a) not since July 2006 and (b) nothing from behind the cut. Dammit.

I should have called that last entry "Jurassic Pork", I know it...

Via sir_phil: all my Friends™, together at last!

( Play clicky-clicky to see the pretty-pretty )




Try out this Meme
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Someone on my f-list mentioned LJ's "SFW" (Safe For Work) filters, the avoidance of whose unwanted attentions required that she spell a certain word "s-x". So I wondered... what are these filters? How do they work? And what would happen if I inserted (oo-er!) a few "not safe" words into an LJ post? Let's see!

Sex! Breasts! Penis! Vagina! Belgium!

Right. Let's see what it thinks of that...

So here I am, typing away in my Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping (ha!) text editor, and posting to LJ. The ljupdate.el package has a few missing features -- you can't go back and select previous entries for re-editing, for example -- but it's still pretty damn clever. lauredhel, apparently there's something similar for Wordpress, so if you're an adherent of the Church of the One True Editor (or willing to be converted) then it might be worth a look.

And if anyone else is looking to follow my example and post their LJs in Emacs, ( please play clicky-clicky here; otherwise read on )

Now that the crunch is finally off at work (we sent the new version to our major client yesterday! yay!) I plan to do other things with my Emacs. We use a version control system here (thank the gods -- it's one sign of a sane software development company, which is why it's the first place I've ever worked that has one) and I wrote a quick&dirty Emacs integration for it, but I want it to be the bee's knees. And there are other tasks I occasionally find myself leaving Emacs to do, which is anathema to any True Believer, so I need to find more add-ons.

I didn't really mean it when I said I'd like an Emacs mode for editing LJs. I mean, sure Emacs is the greatest operating system ever invented, and it has some text-editing capabilities as well, but I don't want to spend all my time in it!

Oh, I don't know though...