Very well, let me take the step & publish my first actual blog post that isn’t imported from the old site or Livejournal.

I’m writing this around 8am the day the clocks changed in the UK, with its distinctive “mini jet-lag” feeling as the light & my body clock shift slightly. Seemed like a good time to do it.

As per my last post, Livejournal seems in increasing decline; I checked there yesterday to see what my friend list looks like these days and, well, as the saying goes, things fade away. Virtually everyone is using Facebook, Twitter, or both. On one level, it’s a shame, as they had the potential to be as successful as Facebook¹; but on the other hand LJ seems to be reverting back to its fanfic roots, so “to your nature be true” I guess.

So, I’ve decided the theme of this rebooted Hello, World post is self-organisation. A quick summary of some ways I’ve been slowly organising my life over the past few months:

• Converting this site to use Wordpress rather than a bunch of custom CMS scripts. This is an ongoing behind-the-scenes process: yesterday converted the Fortean Times Icons page to use NextGen Gallery rather than my own, unmaintained, Thumbmaker script.
• Importing/backing up Livejournal to here. Wordpress has matured so much, it’s a compelling choice; especially if Livejournal ever do go to the great 404 page in the sky as is constantly rumoured. I’m not sure how to handle redirects at this point, or if Wordpress will ever support friend-list style privacy (though out here in the Open Web, I appreciate it’d be missing the point a bit).
• Remember The Milk – to call it just a “to-do application” would be an injustice. Do yourself a favour and check it out. (Hmm, the mere act of writing a blog post has a “talking to the world” feel, which a Livejournal, Facebook, or Twitter post doesn’t even if they are public. Psychological shift detected…)
• Personal Kanban. Try Kanban 101 for an introduction. Using AgileZen at the moment, both personally and at work, with little traction sadly as there data import/export. Current plan is as soon as a decent Kanban tool can import/export, end up using Remember The Milk as a data backend.
• Dieted via the appallingly-branded Celebrity Slim & lost around another 20 pounds since October.

There we go. I’ve also helped launch a site for my friend Sabina, cleverly titled sabinalucia.com/, and sort of promised myself to write/blog more often, as recommended by numerous “personal improvement” sites. A statistic about how 99% of Internet content is produced by less than 1% of its population comes to mind, but I really can’t be bothered to look it up (8am Sunday morning, remember?) and this is already a surprisingly long grab-bag post already. So let’s leave it there & see how things pan out…

In a previous post, I talked about migrating http://vodex.net from the hand-rolled custom scripts to Wordpress. Well, it’s taken a while longer than expected due to other priorities, but it’s done!

Current strategy is to use the site as a set of static pages rather than an actual blog as described here. Then used various plugins like PHP-exec, along with some refactoring, to get the applications, such as MailMaker, over to Wordpress-usable format. The front page is a lifestream of my various web activity, including public Facebook content when they next sort out their APIs.

Observations:

1) There’s a lot of old, old content on that site, that wasn’t so obvious/exposed, and that was largely ignored in favour of Facebook/Google Reader, etc. Now it’s in Wordpress & generally more discoverable, it’s slightly embarrassing, like the RecordHash Data Object, or frankly bizarre, like Waxy Dogheads. I may well end up hiding a lot of these pages.

2) Wordpress is a great platform, it’s really matured. After the content tweaks, it’s much more suitable than the custom CMS I’d writtenmyself.

3) Ruby on Rails applications aren’t ported over, but they don’t work right now, possibly because…

4) The main driver for this was my host breaking PHP, email, and the Rails apps during some sort of systems upgrade I wasn’t notified about. I’m on a ‘development sandbox’ for just $25 a year. Time to change that I think.

5) Now that I’ve started this post, I have the urge to start recapping other areas of my life, such as the use of Kanban, going on a badly-marketed diet again, and other stuff. But Livejournal is on the slide more than ever. Shall I start blogging proper again, or am I joining in the trend of blogging dying off & using increasingly mature social media instead? Could this become my last ever LJ post? Time will tell..

Yes! I have created a Twitter LJ community.

Yes, I seem to have fully caught the twitter bug.

I’ve made use of Paul Stamatiou’s RSS to Twitter script to automatically pimp for technology’s sake announce new Livejournal posts on twitter. It’ll have to run as a cron job for now, unless I can find a way for Livejournal to ping whenever a post is made.

Woohoo! I’ve just gone to Technorati, found out that old addresses for blogs and stuff were out of date, and claimed my canonical LJ address – using OpenID! It took longer to type this than to do it. And first real use of OpenID, too.

heh, it said it’d been last updated 573 days ago. That’s very not right.

Sorry, spod post.

My endless quest to organise the information flowing into my life continues; in this case, switching to Google Reader.

My pattern in getting info from websites has been basically:

* Visit them all manually, and usually forget.

* Repeat until RSS was invented & enough sites carried it (or equivalent) to make it worth switching.

* Use Thunderbird as an RSS reader, as it was the best of many.

* Not have time to read the feeds and fall behind.

* Use Livejournal as an RSS aggregator, to force me to read them.

* Realise that I’ve added so many feeds, I never keep on top of LJ and often don’t even bother, Thus Missing Out, which is even worse.

* Create LJ friends filters to screen out the heavy ones.

* Realise that doesn’t work, and I’m still missing out.

* Move to Google Reader, which not only combines items into one stream as well as show them per feed, but also shows them as details like LJ (no click-read-close), but also marks them as read as you look at them, no intervention needed. A-ha, how will this fare…

Like so many others, I now seem to be using Google for pretty much everything. Except Reader doesn’t allow authentication of feeds, so my spanky friends feed doesn’t work. Still use Thunderbird for that one…

Yee-har! The new ECW isn’t very good. In fact, whilst ‘watching’ it, I achieved high-level spoddery, by fiddling with:

How to get your Livejournal Friends Page as a Web Feed

(Web feeds, also known as RSS, described here.)

If you read a lot of Web Feed through LJ and/or often fall behind in reading friend entries, this is nerdvana, as they can now popup in Thunderbird, Google Reader, etc. and can be read like email, or with your other news. Yes, even protected/flocked posts. Here’s how:

• Based on http://community.livejournal.com/lj_nifty/119447.html . The instructions seem a bit out of date; the below worked for me.
• http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layers.bml – this is some hopelessly hapless form of style-generation language…
• Create top-level layer. The Type is Layout.
• In the funky programming window, copy and paste in the text from http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layersource.bml?id=2870759&fmt=html
• Press ‘Save & Compile’, and realise there is no way out of the funky programming window.
• Escape by going to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/styles.bml – create a new style called anything. After you press Create, from the Layout box choose the bottom option (should say ‘RSS’). Press Change, and then press Save Changes.
• Go back to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/styles.bml – you should now see your new style. Click on it and check it is a RSS Feed (Firefox says ‘Subscribe to this feed’).
• You can now use Thunderbird of your favourite RSS reader with this address:
• http://NAME.livejournal.com/friends/?s2id=STYLEID&auth=digest
• e.g. mine is http://vodex.livejournal.com/friends/?s2id=14194083&auth=digest , but you have to create your own for some reason
• the ‘auth=digest’ bit means you login through the RSS reader and get flocked entries; you might want to tick ‘Show the Article Summary’ as well, to get the text of the article; otherwsie you get a link to the original web page & you’ll have to log in to LJ to see it.

Blimey, that’s a bit involved, isn’t it? It seems you create an style ‘layer’ that makes RSS instead of purty web pages, which you then make a style out of.

And you can’t just use someone else’s style layer; you have to create your own, duplicate, one, in a Perl-script-from-1997 kind of way.

Hurrah for spoddery!

Imagine my surprise whilst developing my new PHP navigation system to find that my Wordpress Livejournal plugin is the top Google result for “wordpress livejournal”.

Huzzah! In one night (and after quite a day), I have produced my first ever Wordpress plugin.

http://www.vodex.me.uk/projects/lj_feed_import/

It’s still under development (needs to be added to the admin option panel rather than just running every time), but it automatically imports Livejournal posts into Wordpress, and not the other way around as most plugins want (post to Wordpress, auto-post to Livejournal). This is what I want (LJ is my primary publishing tool).

It needs more work, but not at this time of night…!

If like me, you were surprised when these ‘tags’ started appearing on people’s LJs, then a) you don’t read news, and b) you might find this little giude helpful.

Tags describe the meaning of LiveJournal posts. There must be billions of the little blighters by now, but computers have trouble understanding human languages, with all the subtleties, inane ramblings, and smut, not to mention misspellings. So the huge amounts of information inside them lies hidden and hard to find – in technical terms, there is little metadata in LJ, so automatic manipulation of it (what computers do) is hard.

This is why they’ve put tags in. By tagging a post with, say, ‘Doctor Who’, you tell LiveJournal that’s what the post is about, even if it’s just a cartoon with no words.
But wait, there’s more! As tags become more widely used, all the funky tricks that search engines can pull with the Web at large will also happen to LiveJournal, based on tags. Never mind stuff like “What have my friends said about Doctor Who” – all sorts of subtle and amazing things. Think how Google takes on the sheer chaos of the web and sorts and categorises it – automatically. Combine that with the creativity and individuality you get in, say, LJ User Interests, and multiply by every post you’ve ever read, and then another 1000 more.

You add tags on the Update Journal page. Enter the tags separated by commas. You can add tags to an existing entry is easy too – click on the ‘link’ link, and click on the icon. type in the tags, or click on the box of your existing tags (hold down Control when clicking to add more than one!)

I see two strategies to using tags:

* If you want your posts to be analysed, sorted, and generally Googled, add tags for anything that seems relevant. If you’re the sort to write fan fiction where Spike and Captain Jack get it on, then, yes, tag it with “doctor who, captain jack, buffy, spike, slash, fanfic” and people will use the tags to find it. See the tags for this post for another example.

* But if you want to group your entries but stop LJ from sucking them up like some big Hoover, use obscure tags that stumps the computer. If Mike and Kate are getting married, tag each entry with ‘mikenkatewed’ - no-one’s going to stumble across that in a hurry..

Or you could not use tags at all, but then when you want to find something, you wind up trawling through hundreds of entries a page at a time, which I’m sick of. I love tags. Hope this helps!