Half the day is night
Well, it's equinox and that means some sort of update is in order.
It's going to be briefer than I intended, for a number of reasons.
Tested the migrate function of antennapedia's ljmigrate tool today.
It worked okay, but you can only perform journal to journal or community to community backups, no conversions between them.
Also, if for some reason you've not entered a journal to migrate to the first time around when you backup your original journal, then the migrate tool simply skips the migration step by the time you do.
You'll have to move your backupped folder elsewhere and redo the backup/migrate from the start, since it does it all in one step.
Also, there's no control over what to migrate, but that's a minor issue.
The tool does backdate migrated entries, though they'll still trigger the LJ new post notification if you have it set for the other journal, which I did, as a test. I see this being useful for annoying potential stalkers.
I'd gotten up to 109 entries on the journal I was test-migrating, and LJ dutifully sent 109 notification emails to the address I have set for the account which was set to receive the notifications, all in the space of less than 10 minutes.
Well, at least I know that email account is robust.
Eventually I'll do a fuller review and and some pictures of the various options for offsite posting/backup available for the Mac.
I already did get a start by listing and linking to most of the options in a container post, though clearly it needs more fleshing out.
I also took the time to opt out of LJ's latest invasive marketing venture for all my accounts, including the community. Incidentally, to opt out your community from being one of the ones having its pageclicks recorded, you'll have to modify their opt out instructions to:
set for communityname opt_exclude_stats 1
As usual, there's a fair amount of whining in the user comments is from people still demanding clarification on LJ's vague content policies (when anyone with half a brain cell can tell that LJ's just being lying weasel people trying to cover their asses in front of advertisers and will kick off your underage Harry Potter smut with the sanctimonious excuse of deleting child pornography, which it isn't), although I suspect that some of the people still at it are doing it out of sheer perversity by now, much as I continue to post these updates regarding my use of a journaling service I don't actually blog on anymore.
The rest of the whining comes from people who still don't seem to understand how the internet works.
I personally find it fairly reasonable that LJ would try to track how people navigate their site, though handing that over to a third-party is rather dubious, especially with LJ's previous lax track record on protecting user privacy, which is how I ended up getting spam in my formerly pristine inbox.
Gee, thanks, LJ.
But normally I wouldn't have bothered to opt out of such a thing, since I'd actually want them to know that on the few occasions when I bother to use the damn site, I use the Lynx scheme and have the “show number of comments in URL” setting set because I like a clean interface and useful options and have turned off the damned navigation toolbar at the top because I find it annoying on journals that have it.
But it seems that it just tracks visitors to one's journal and there's no disclosure of whose journal gets tracked, so I've set all of mine to opt out, just to show them that I like having an opt-out function for this kind of thing.
Besides, it's not like I visit the LJ site enough to have any significant statistical effect, and they probably do it all through javascript, which I have turned off for their site.
Other useful things: one can now opt out of receiving virtual gifts on the Viewing Options page, which I have, for all gifts and on all accounts, because these are either going to be paid for by an actual person wasting their money giving money to LJ for a 100x100 picture and some text, or by an advertising sponsor subsidizing LJ with their advertising dollars while promoting their product, Pepsi Max style.
And I honestly think that after all they've done, LJ/SixApart deserve to lose money and customers.
More on that later, once I've gotten that horribly overdue commentary I meant to do on them earlier done, or at least vaguely approaching beta draft status.
There was going to be something else, but I forget what it is for now.
It's going to be briefer than I intended, for a number of reasons.
Tested the migrate function of antennapedia's ljmigrate tool today.
It worked okay, but you can only perform journal to journal or community to community backups, no conversions between them.
Also, if for some reason you've not entered a journal to migrate to the first time around when you backup your original journal, then the migrate tool simply skips the migration step by the time you do.
You'll have to move your backupped folder elsewhere and redo the backup/migrate from the start, since it does it all in one step.
Also, there's no control over what to migrate, but that's a minor issue.
The tool does backdate migrated entries, though they'll still trigger the LJ new post notification if you have it set for the other journal, which I did, as a test. I see this being useful for annoying potential stalkers.
I'd gotten up to 109 entries on the journal I was test-migrating, and LJ dutifully sent 109 notification emails to the address I have set for the account which was set to receive the notifications, all in the space of less than 10 minutes.
Well, at least I know that email account is robust.
Eventually I'll do a fuller review and and some pictures of the various options for offsite posting/backup available for the Mac.
I already did get a start by listing and linking to most of the options in a container post, though clearly it needs more fleshing out.
I also took the time to opt out of LJ's latest invasive marketing venture for all my accounts, including the community. Incidentally, to opt out your community from being one of the ones having its pageclicks recorded, you'll have to modify their opt out instructions to:
set for communityname opt_exclude_stats 1
As usual, there's a fair amount of whining in the user comments is from people still demanding clarification on LJ's vague content policies (when anyone with half a brain cell can tell that LJ's just being lying weasel people trying to cover their asses in front of advertisers and will kick off your underage Harry Potter smut with the sanctimonious excuse of deleting child pornography, which it isn't), although I suspect that some of the people still at it are doing it out of sheer perversity by now, much as I continue to post these updates regarding my use of a journaling service I don't actually blog on anymore.
The rest of the whining comes from people who still don't seem to understand how the internet works.
I personally find it fairly reasonable that LJ would try to track how people navigate their site, though handing that over to a third-party is rather dubious, especially with LJ's previous lax track record on protecting user privacy, which is how I ended up getting spam in my formerly pristine inbox.
Gee, thanks, LJ.
But normally I wouldn't have bothered to opt out of such a thing, since I'd actually want them to know that on the few occasions when I bother to use the damn site, I use the Lynx scheme and have the “show number of comments in URL” setting set because I like a clean interface and useful options and have turned off the damned navigation toolbar at the top because I find it annoying on journals that have it.
But it seems that it just tracks visitors to one's journal and there's no disclosure of whose journal gets tracked, so I've set all of mine to opt out, just to show them that I like having an opt-out function for this kind of thing.
Besides, it's not like I visit the LJ site enough to have any significant statistical effect, and they probably do it all through javascript, which I have turned off for their site.
Other useful things: one can now opt out of receiving virtual gifts on the Viewing Options page, which I have, for all gifts and on all accounts, because these are either going to be paid for by an actual person wasting their money giving money to LJ for a 100x100 picture and some text, or by an advertising sponsor subsidizing LJ with their advertising dollars while promoting their product, Pepsi Max style.
And I honestly think that after all they've done, LJ/SixApart deserve to lose money and customers.
More on that later, once I've gotten that horribly overdue commentary I meant to do on them earlier done, or at least vaguely approaching beta draft status.
There was going to be something else, but I forget what it is for now.