301 Moved Permanently

[jwz]

301

This is just a mirror.
My real blog is on jwz.org.
Please comment there.
There is also an RSS feed.

301
I used Livejournal to host my blog from 2002 through late 2010, when the level of quality and utility finally decreased enough that it was easier to self-host my blog than to keep fighting with Livejournal.
These were my reasons for giving up on Livejournal, and some links explaining what I replaced it with:

1. 
   It was unconscionable that my readers would often be shown full-screen pop-over Flash ads on top of my content, even though I have a "permanent" account. I don't know whether the problem was that Livejournal's policy kept changing, or whether they just couldn't fix the bugs in their ad code, and I don't care; my readers kept complaining about it, and rightly so.
2. 
   The spam got completely out of control. I was getting a ton of comments like, "Ha ha, that same thing happened to me when I tried to fix my bathroom plumbing, HREF=SPAM-PLUMBERS-INFO-VIAGRA-UK". Or the same thing but in Russian. Turning on CAPTCHAs didn't help. The only option that did work was to moderate comments from non-friends, which is as much work as playing whack-a-mole with the spam.
3. 
   I used to use LJ as my RSS feed aggregator, and that got less and less reliable every day. Often feeds would stall for days or weeks at a time, dumping out the new posts all at once and very late. Often weeks' worth of posts would just go missing because one of the posts in a feed had some minor HTML syntax error in it. Feeds that contained Youtube videos or other embeds wouldn't show the videos at all; and so on. So I switched all of my feeds over to a feed reader and couldn't be happier. I use NetNewsWire on the desktop, and use either NetNewsWire or Reeder on my iPhone and iPad.
4. 
   I used to use Livejournal's Jabber server as my way of chatting with people on Google Chat and Facebook Chat (via the Adium client). Livejournal's Jabber server became increasingly unreliable. When it wasn't down outright, it often silently failed to peer with the rest of the Jabber network for weeks at a time. I gave up and signed up for a GMail account which I use solely so that I can have a Jabber account on Google's server.

And finally, but possibly most importantly,

1. All but a couple of my friends stopped posting here. They have all moved their "personal" writing over to Facebook (with the side effect that their personal writing has gotten a lot shorter.) This isn't LJ's fault per se, but it still resulted in LJ being far less interesting.
   This is why "use DreamWidth" isn't a solution to the Livejournal problem. That may fix a few of their technical issues, but it doesn't change the fact that the community has gone away. That's just trading one sinking ship for a much smaller copy of the same sinking ship.

I now self-host my blog on my own site using WordPress. It was a relatively painless migration. WordPress is easy to install, and there are tools for bulk-importing your Livejournal into it. You can read how I did it, and the list of plugins I chose, on my blog post about it.
I was initially worried that if I moved my blog away from LJ, I would get fewer comments. That turned out not to be the case. People who still use LJ can log in on my new blog using LJ as their OpenID provider, so it's relatively painless for them to comment there. (No need to make a new account or anything.)

LJ RIP
2002 - 2010