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..

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…!