nehrlich - Stupid Perlick trick

11:32 pm: Stupid Perlick trick
I still haven't figured out a blogging solution yet. This definitely ups the encouragement for me to get new blogging software in place once I get home. Eit. One of these days I'll find a nice cafe with Wifi and get a few entries uploaded. In the meantime, I'll scratch my blogging itch on Livejournal and give you NYC vignettes.

Excitement of the day - the screen on my sidekick totally fritzed this morning, no longer displaying anything at all. Which turns out to make a Sidekick completely useless because everything is modal. Used my host's computer to find a nearby T-Mobile store. My options were to wait for a warranty replacement, which would be two weeks, and use a loaner phone in the meantime. Or to just buy a Sidekick II. I'd been thinking of getting a Sidekick II anyway, and I really wanted all of my phone and contact information as it was because my phone's the best way to reach me, so I paid up. The transfer was surprisingly painless - pop in the old SIM, and everything worked. Kind of remarkable, really.

Although the II is similar enough to the original Sidekick that it led to the Stupid Perlick Trick of the Day. I couldn't figure out why everybody sounded so faint when I used my phone. And they seemed to have trouble hearing me. I got home in the evening, and dug out the manual. Turned out that they reversed the location of the speaker and microphone on the II. I was holding it the wrong way while talking. Oops. Stupid Perlick Trick! Yay!

P.S. The new MOMA building is excellent. More on that in a real entry. Someday.

Comments

From:	dr_tectonic
Date:	March 15th, 2005 04:44 am (UTC)

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Bwa-ha-ha!

Though it seems to me that you have worked out a perfectly fine blogging solution with LJ. Drink the kool-ade. Joinnnn usssss.

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From:	nehrlich
Date:	March 15th, 2005 12:59 pm (UTC)

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I don't trust LJ (or any corporation for that matter) with my blogging content. That's what it comes down to. I want to have all of my stuff on a server that I control. Given how much thought I'm putting into some of these posts, I don't want even the possibility that one day LJ wakes up and says, "Y'know what? We're going to delete a bunch of old posts to clear room on our servers". Or whatever. It's fine for light, topical stuff, but some of the other stuff I'm doing is better suited to a Movable Type or Wordpress installation on a server of my own. Or at least one that I'm paying for with a contract involved or something. I'm just paranoid, is basically what it comes down to.

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From:	melted_snowball
Date:	March 15th, 2005 03:58 pm (UTC)

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You can download all of your posts month-by-month, if you're so inclined.

(For me, I'd expect that the probability that a computer I controlled, and kept my journal on, would die is substantially higher than the probability that LJ would eat my content. But computers hate me.)

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From:	dr_tectonic
Date:	April 7th, 2005 05:33 pm (UTC)

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Hey, I found a solution to this:

"LiveJournal offers a Perl script which allows you to download a copy of your entire journal and entries left within it. This script requires some technical knowledge, but if you are able to use wget I'd expect you to be able to make it work. This script can be found in our CVS respository at http://cvs.livejournal.org/browse.cgi/livejournal/src/jbackup/jbackup.pl "

It does clever things with perl and databases to grab data incrementally and not hose the servers, and it lets you dump it in raw XML or in HTML. I wish there were a way to dump a local mirror of what your journal looks like online, but at least all the content is there. I'm toying with a perl script that will munge the HTML output into something more like what's on the web, but haven't gotten too far yet...

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From:	nehrlich
Date:	April 7th, 2005 05:50 pm (UTC)

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Livejournal also doesn't do things like trackbacks, which I'd really like. It also tends to exclude people that don't have livejournal accounts - even though you can comment anonymously, it doesn't seem like people do. Then again, it may just be that my non-livejournal friends don't comment, period.

I finally broke down yesterday and admitted I'm way too lazy to ever set up a server, and bought space on a commercial site (http://textdrive.com). http://perlick.org and http://dorkbutt.com are already moved over - I'll get nehrlich.com moved over in the next couple days.

More importantly, I downloaded Wordpress, and it's pretty nifty. Haven't quite hammered it into doing what I want yet, but it's got a bazillion options, so I'm sure I will eventually. http://perlick.org/wordpress if you want to see my futzing attempts.

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