Blogging since 2002
Once again instead of writing something good for you to read I am changing my blogging software. Movable Type was a little better than Livejournal, but looks like WordPress is the right tool for me.
It will take some time for me to fix the feeds, lins, etc, so bear with me for a while.
Livejournal’s outstanding found_objects community has this gem that is a mix of CSI and Capital 1’s “What’s In Yer Wallet?” commercial.
Don’t know about you, but I just had to check all the bills in my wallet.
Last couple of weeks were rather stressful for me, thus no posts lately. I would like to break that non-posting streak and work on my site a bit as well.
First order of business – following antonme’s suggestion I installed MTLJPost plugin which will duplicate my posts in my Livejournal making dprogrammer_rss unnecessary. I will be turning off MT’s commenting feature and directing all commenters to Livejournal. I am too lazy to install the threaded comments hack in MT, and there seems to be almost no comment spam in Livejournal. I still need to do a lot of work on MT templates – the layout I have right now is rather ugly and not very usable.
I pretty much achieved what I wanted on the ad front – in about 30 days I’ve earned $7.99 with 1.8% clicthrough rate and $2.49 CPM. That’s a Fair und Balanced newspaper for every weekday! CPM by the way is a mysterious marketing term which means Cost Per Mil, where Mil (or Roman numeral M) stands not for Million but for for 10^3.
This cornucopia of revenue should be of course offset by my hosting costs, taxes and a purchase of $227.00 (+$5 s&h) Gretag McBeth Eye-One (aka i1) monitor color calibration thingy from an advertiser that google ads showed in my post. This might actually be the first time I ever bought anything from an online ad. Oh, Eye-One is outstanding. I will write a review sometime, but it’s definitely the way to go.
1) Old entries are hard to get to: “back n entries” works only for a while, after that you need to go day by day. Which makes paging through a blog that is not updated daily a nightmare.
2) Can’t run ads.
3) The degenerate “friends” system with it’s stupid add/remove politics. It’s better to read stuff in an aggregator.
4) Livejournal is widely known for drama and teenage angst. Having a Livejournal blog is similar to having an AOL email – it doesn’t matter that the famous hacker JWZ has one. People will still think that you are a loser.
5) No categories. You have to keep a separate journal if you want to give your readers an ability to read only stuff that interests them. I want to write some entries in Russian, but do not want to have a separate journal for that. Also some of my readers might be interested in my photos, but not in what I think about Livejournal.
6) Constant outages, lost posts, slowness and other technical fun. What else can you expect if you share your servers with a million teenagers frantically refreshing their “friends lists”.
7) No trackback.
8) Image hosting that is still in beta, but a fully released “phonepost” system that instead of using MP3 format uses OGG. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a player that would actually play these files when I click on them, but for the most part miserably failed. Those are a couple of hours of my life that I’ll never get back. I mean, what the hell is wrong? You click on a file, the player opens, but doesn’t play anything. You click play button – nothing. You click again…. Arrrgh, it’s driving me nuts!
9) No web logs – you have no idea how many people actually read your stuff. The only indicators that you might have are how many “friends” you have and how many comments you get (both of which are poor indicators). Since you can’t run JavaScript, you can’t have a reliable third party tracker either. I’ve had a visitor from northropgrumman.com at my new shiny (well, not so shiny yet) MT based site, and I would not have know that if it was still at Livejournal. Hey, Northrop Grumman reader, who are you?
10) If you set an article with a future date in Livejournal, instead of showing up if your readers lists normally, it sometimes disappears. There’s a bug there somewhere.
Livejournal does have a superior comment system, but since I don’t get too many comments it doesn’t matter that much.
Did you expect the Spanish Inquisition? No? Well, nobody does. But it brings you 11th reason:
11) No integrated search.
I finally installed MovableType, converted my Livejournal entries and created a very rough preliminary design featuring a graphic made for me on commission by the very talented Jesse Reklaw of Slow Wave fame.
The masthead, secondary pages, xml feeds and all the shiny features like categories, pings, trackback, etc still need a lot of work. This is why I suggest you don’t subscribe to XML feeds yet – there likely to be a lot of change in them.
MovableType has a feature for timing the release of entries that actually works well (unlike Livejournal’s) and since I write posts in bursts on weekends, I’ll try to time them so that they will spread through the week, making Deadprogrammer.com an almost daily blog.
I have a few dozen topics for posts right now, but I am also working on lostindication.com (my photography portfolio), organizing my notes (of which I have a few notebooks), finishing deadprogrammer.com, working on a few other interesting projects. Since I have a day job, the progress is slow.
Avast, me hearties! This probably be the last post in me scurvy Livejournal. I’ve finally decided to make like all the cool pirates and board good ship Movable Type. I also plan on using a news aggregatarrr instad of scurvy Livejournal bucko list. While the bilge sysadmins at my hosting provider scurry to install all the necessary perl booty there will a small break in me posts. I will post some updates as smartly as possible. If ye have any sea wisdom about MT, I’d be glad to hear it.
Happy TLPD,
Cap’n Deadprogrammer
Do I have any readers outside of Livejournal? Leave me a comment if you are such a reader. Any Microsofties out there?
P.S. If you need an LJ code, just ask.
I wonder how many people are reading my livejournal through an RSS aggregator. Apparently paid livejournal users get a full text rss feed (and not just the headings). So here it is : 
Moving over more stuff from my Russian journal.
Is youknowwho back in LiveJournal? Or did somebody just waste one of my perfectly good lj codes?
Livejournal presents a unique look into the mind of a doctor from Alabama. Crap, crap, crap, crap. Why did I have to read that?
I think, that I now believe what he wrote in his user info.