Mat Bowles

Item: Jennie put on Would I Lie To You, and the female panellist reveals she lied repeatedly to her husband before they married.

Jennie: Why did he marry her then?
Me: Jennie? She's Keeley Hawes.
(Jennie then went on to wonder why she felt the need to lie, but that's a Serious Topic)

Item: I am a listed here: Brighouse Ward: Statement of persons nominated: Calderdale Council, yes, that is the ward I actually live in, and yes, I'm actually running seriously to try to win. Last minute unplanned nomination, but that doesn't change that I could do it and would like to. This does of course mean that I'll need to be posting some 'local news' stuff over the next few weeks, as that'll be stuff I'll be concentrating on. And having spent years building up the Google presence for my name, ought to actually make use of it.

Item: Livejournal has for the best part of the last week been under a massive, sustained DDOS attack. It appears to be politically motivated from within Russia. This does of course highlight the need, if you care about such things, to backup your journal somewhere, either on your own machine or elsewhere online. I like that I've got two homes that are interoperable for my writing; if you haven't got a DW account & don't want to pay for one, I have a number of invite codes spare--I need an email address to send them to, feel free to comment or email me (matbowles@gmail.com).

Item: At the gym recently, Jennie watched an episode of Doctors, partially. It had Colin Baker in it. She didn't see all of it, so is now inflicting it on me. It has some reasonable actors and acting in it. Shame about the script, plot, etc...

Couldn't resist writing this one up: In post-Soviet Russia, President blogs you. The President of Russia has a Livejournal (blog_medvedev) and updates it (or gets someone to, anyway) fairly regularly.

( LJ, its future, DW not a threat and SUp taking it in the wrong direction )

Ah well. I'm supposed to be writing up what's wrong with the OpenID implementation on both LJ and DW, but I keep getting distracted.

Short version: ( Both sites are problematic, DW has the excuse of being new, LJ has no excuse at all )

That's pathetic. Hopefully the competitive pressure from DW will push them into making more improvements, like it has done elsewhere. Competition is, after all, a good thing, and LJs been stuck in its own little rut with nowt but a bunch of clones for too long.

Meh, rambling. Time to go do something constructive.

Short version. Livejournal has today fired about half of its US based staff, including several people that I'd say are key, if not crucial to the operation. This means that while SUP/LJ Inc have the right ideas about where to take the site, they're running out of money (and paid over the odds anyway) and can't afford to do it.

I suspect that LJ itself will continue, as it has ongoing revenue, but the improvements that it needs to turn itself into the successful site it could've been will now be significantly slowed, which puts the long term health of the site in danger. Not got time to do a full post, but here are some links:
( ... )
I promised a 'how to' on backing up your journal and exporting it to other platforms, in order to write that I first need to do it myself fully and properly, so that'll happen later on (hopefully tonight, depends if I can get it all to work). In the meantime, some of the comments/posts linked abouve are from rahaeli/synecdochic, who used to be an LJ staffer but left to concentrate on her writing career (I got the impression she was asked to defend the indefensible once too often)—she's a good fiction writer FWIW. Last year, she announced that with a small number of others she'd be working on a fork of the Open Source Livejournal code (to be called Dreamwidth) to update it, make it compatible with modern servers and run a platform that'd be more community friendly in the way LJ "used to be". Many of the proposals she put forward were ones that echoed what I was looking for—crucially a separation between your 'reading' list and the people you trust to read your friends locked posts, as well as complete interoperability with other sites on the same codebase.

That latter is interesting—if she/they (we?) can get it going, then different people could run Dreamwidth installations and you could still add people, let them read your secure entries, etc from your friends page, without much if any extra effort on your part. That could mean that anyone could pay for a server and run their own site. Drawback is that you'd need your own webserver, renting one of them is a minimum of £50 per month, much more for something decent.

But if enough people were to chip in, it'd be more than possible. In fact, it'd be more than viable, it'd possibly be a very good plan. There are a bunch of you reading this that know a lot more about the backend side of this sort of thing than me—we'd need to work to set it up, and then install updates, etc. Almost certainly viable with enough people, so, well...
[Poll #1326311]

Whatever thoughts crossed my mind that weren't worth a whole post.

• 22:56 trying to get to livejournal. Can anyone get to either www.livejournal.com/ or matgb.livejournal.com/ #

Yeah, alright, if you can read this then you know LJ is back up again, it wasn't when I tweeted, and besides, I said it three minutes before status updated. Anyway, change of emphasis. My icon is borked, can oyu let me know what you can see as the avatar for this post? It's supposed to be Fineas with the word 'Life' at the bottom, not some ugly bloke. Support say they've fixed it but...

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Microblogging using LoudTwitter and Twitter. matgb_twitter is there if you're mad enough.

Next Tuesday, from about 16.00, all Livejournal powered blogs and services will be down for approximately 4 hours. You know what? That's a damn good thing. Last year, when I was considering not renewing my paid account, my principle reason was:

Competing blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have a multiple redundancy system for its hosting, so that if one centre fails there are backups elsewhere; specifically, they do not trust all their data security to one location situated the wrong side of a major fault line.

They're moving the servers and location that all of Livejournal is stored on from San Francisco, a beautiful city due to fall into the sea at some point very soon, to a place called Billings in the middle of Montana. They're also, medium term, planning a co-location centre so that there's a backup server farm in case something happens to the main one.

Oh, last time they relocated the servers, there was some issue with spam filters as LJ's current IP is whitelisted, they'll hopefully have sorted things out but comment notifications might go missing for a few days...

So, y'know, no LJ next Tuesday afternoon. Guess I'll have to stay in the pub...

Interesting comment made at minnesattva's:

The sensible thing to do would be to differentiate LJ, position it if you like as an 'intellectual networking site', or the equivalent of a collaborative newspaper (it has news, opinion, cartoons...) - something you *read* (or write) rather than something you play at. You could even have a default set of people who would be added as your 'friends' when you started on LJ representing some of the best/most popular writing on here - people like say bradhicks or theyorkshergob who don't write about themselves on their journals much but write about actual *stuff*, but who you could then add or subtract at will...

Can't say I disagree with that at all, and am amused at the two choices given as examples. I have, naturally, got a whole passel of posts in my head on the whole SUP buyout/ending-of-Basic/interest not-really-censorship thing, but, y'know, lack of motivation strikes again. I do think ending Basic accounts is a daft idea, and I thinkt he way it wasn't clearly announced was insanely stupid.

SUP appear to want to treat LJ as a Social Network, not a blogging platform with SN elements, which I think is completely the wrong way to go, especially given the Russian market success where blogging means LJ. Ah well.

Possibility my long-on-hiatus alternate platform collection of ideas might get dug out again soon. Possibly.

In a discussion about the interesting Beeb article on gender differences andrewducker says:

You know, the quality of comments like this, and the breadth of knowledge available on my friends list is one of the reasons I love livejournal.

I'd amend it slightly to say blogging generally, but LJ, with the built in friends list aggregator, does make it very easy to keep in touch with a huge chunk of people with knowledge in specific areas way beyond my own.

Not sure on the research as presented, she's definitely got a point, but as always generalisations can be beaten by specifics--my index and ring finger are roughly the same length, and I definitely show both "male" and "female" traits depending on context, and I know a fair number of women that are a lot more "male" than me in most respects. But on the other hand, I definitely agree that a good mix of talents and a good gender ratio make for a much more succesful office/business in general situations, and I'm always slightly wary when a profession, office or place of work is too skewed one way or the other.

How great am I? You don't know? Things to cheer you up on the train home, a notification in your inbox from coffeechica entitled DRUM ROLL:

This suggestion has been planned for implementation. Please watch the lj_releases community for updates.

I knew what post it was before I opened it, but it was nice to be sure. So that's two fixes from one suggestion.

I'm still of the opinion that the concerns about trolls editing comments are missplaced, but those that run LJ abuse disagreed--we've come up with a way to get around the problem. I reserve the right to bitch about them messing up MY idea with poor implementation, but, y'know. I rock!

ETA: Changelog entry detailing how it works:

( Bullet point summary of implementation--paid users only apparently )

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Oh, had a great night out, met nhw in the Melton Mowbray and talked SF geekery and politics with a bunch of people, was rather nice. Time to sleep now methinks.

Reasons to read the_lj_herald #XXVII
the_lj_herald: News Flash: upcoming changes and staff changes:

Users will be be able to filter their entries according to their security settings by appending security/friends, security/public, security/friends or security/group:customgroupname to their journal URLs. Style System 1 users will see filtered pages in the style that is used to display their tag pages and not in their own styles. This new feature may or may not be available to all users.

Expanded on by the volunteer who wrote the code, ciaran_h in the comments:

As the maker of the security filtering patch, I'd like to give you a bit more info...

You'll actually be able to filter by adding /security/public, /security/friends, /security/private, or /security/group:customgroupname to the URL, in the same way as you can something similar with tags.

( more explanation )

Has to be said, especially as I'm planning on re-exporting soon, theis'll be a great feature, finding all your locked posts quickly will be very useful.

Reminder: The Herald is run by a bunch of non-staff anonymously (I think I can name one of the eds, but I'm not going to), and tracks a huge number of sources to round up any significant announcements in a nice friendly format. Definitely worth reading, especiallyif you don't follow any other LJ comms.

OK, a fairly long post on the most recent news and another nail in LJ's coffin.  Those of you just interested in the future rather than the LJ trainwreck may want to skip to the second half.

( A big strength of Livejournal )( Livejournal may have the most insane abuse policy of any blogging platform )

This affects ALL of us

( Standard blogging techniques breach LJs TOS—even quiz memes could get you in trouble )
( A caveat, but either way it's a big problem for LJ )

So...
( My plans for 'jumping ship' (redux) )
So, some clarifications.
( Livejournal has two principle Unique Selling Points (USPs) )
( What I'm looking at for journalling/blogging )
( What I'm looking at for the Friends Page )
( As for the network?  )
Maybe, if we get this right, we can have it so you choose where to put your content. You choose how to aggregate the content of others. You do it quickly, and easily. You choose whter to trust as a primary platform a company like LJ, a friend running a node (*waves hand*), a new start up, or you get your own server.

But they can all interlink, all interoperate. It'd be like LJ, with the privacy you want, but encompassing the whole damn web.

I think that'd be cool. Will it work? Dunno. But the prognosis is good.

Let's reclaim the Web

I'll, um, get back to avoiding work on my bit, right?