I have LiveJournal

Sat Feb 15 11:33:25 EST 2003

I have historically kept journal type entries in my adventures section of my website. My plan is to mirror them in my livejournal.

So many of my friends in the Boston area have livejournals, I decided I need an account because of how much it would help me keep track of them. I can add them to my friends list, and view all of their latest entries in one place.

My next dilemma was what to do with my existing Adventures section of my website, vs. my livejournal account. I want to keep the content on my site because it is entertaining to track hits and referrers (I can see what google searches led you here), and if I ever change the urls (which I've done before), I can redirect all of the old urls to the new ones. With livejournal, if I stop using it, I would just loose the hits. I also feared the potential for livejournal related psychodrama that I'd heard of. But the advantage of using livejournal is that my friends could much more easily read my posts. Then at Arisia it was mentioned to me that livejournal had a really easy to use HTTP API (programming interface). So the obvious solution is to modify the software I wrote to maintain My Adventures to automatically update my LiveJournal. So that's the goal, and I'll probably do it manually for a long time before that actually happens. And I've checked "Block Robots/Spiders from indexing your journal" so that search engine hits continue to go to my server.

My other major concern about LiveJournal is the potential for dataloss. If LiveJournal vanished from the face of the earth this instant, how devastating would the loss of all of those entries be to how many people ? What percentage of them bother to back their stuff up ? I'm guessing almost none. This is not much of a concern for my data, because even if I used only LiveJournal, I would at least write a script to regularly harvest the content and store it elsewhere. But if you have one, please regularly backup your livejournal via their simple web interface.
next:Fade to... white ?2003-02-15
previous:Arisia2003-01-22

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