This entry is just to test the share to g+ thingy; if you haven’t converted from Blogger profiles to G+ ones yet, you ought to :-).
I just wish it was automatic or could be made to work with something like twitterfeed.
Blogger
In the future, journal entries should now be syndicated via RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Commentators using Facebook rather than Blogger, will be LARTed.
When Google+ integrates better with Blogger, we’ll see what happens, hehe. It is rapidly becoming my preferred media but Blogger is better suited for longer stuff. Give us more API Googlers, more API!
It is done! -> This Journal Moved To Blogger
Right, I’ve just finished something that has taken me almost two years to finish by hand, since the available tools couldn’t keep up with the content. Hmm, makes me think of a line from one of my favourite films! But at long last, and vastly overdue—my journal is now totally under the Blogger roof. 2009-12-05, I posted on LJ and Blogger, that I had moved things here. Well, 2011-03-27, it seems to finally be complete. Even noticed half a months extra posts after I was finished lol. Since beginning with Live Journal back on 2011-09-09, I’ve made 2,039 entries, assuming that I have not missed any of the 1,537 entries that I was supposed to import >_>.
In honour of completion, I think I’ll post the stats of that count to date, something I originally planned to do at 2,000 entries, along with a little celebration, but hey, I didn’t expect to notice my two-thousandth post anyway lol. Right, anyway here is the table!
| 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | |
| January |
12 |
26 |
61 |
46 |
16 |
0 |
| February |
15 |
26 |
40 |
33 |
27 |
0 |
| March |
28 |
23 |
69 |
55 |
26 |
0 |
| April |
0 |
48 |
68 |
62 |
20 |
0 |
| May |
0 |
108 |
47 |
41 |
20 |
0 |
| June |
0 |
69 |
49 |
28 |
16 |
0 |
| July |
0 |
58 |
43 |
49 |
25 |
0 |
| August |
0 |
37 |
46 |
50 |
28 |
0 |
| September |
0 |
26 |
45 |
62 |
24 |
24 |
| October |
0 |
26 |
23 |
45 |
23 |
4 |
| November |
0 |
26 |
40 |
44 |
31 |
17 |
| December |
0 |
16 |
32 |
52 |
42 |
18 |
| Total |
55 |
489 |
563 |
567 |
298 |
63 |
This shows that until getting into the whole job thing, the trend has been for my level of blogging to stay fairly steady. I would say an average of 1 1/2 entries per day at its height. Generally, I’ve been most active during the first half of the year. 2011 and 2006 being very slow, as one is when I started and one is little more than 25% into it, inverse-respectively.
One thing I really do hope for, is that after this move is sorted, I’ll have more time to update my journal more frequently than I have these past few months. I really don’t update things here about my present line of work (as a matter of personal policy), and anything interesting really is the subject domain of my notes anyway.
One thing I do know, it’s better to have a journal than nothing but memory. And that’s saying something, since 2008-2009 are still pretty much in my `recent` memory, and my trail of memories largely go back to the early 1990s!
I’ve just managed to import my journal entries from October 2009, that should just leave the majority of September, than my transition from Live Journal to Blogger, should ‘technically’ be complete once and for all!
Give or take 10-20some entries, I would say I’m approaching 1800 posts since I started keeping a journal back in ’06. Planning to celebrate my 2000th entry, if I ever notice it’s passing :-o.
Also took some time to move one of my older projects to github. Really, it’s kind of cool: I sat down and read about 1500 out of 2300+ lines of perl code and could still understand it nearly a year later. Paged through the remaining ~800LOC, which was mostly trivial elements. Someday I need to get the ‘uncommitted’ test suite committed and work on some cleanup, but it reads easily enough. I don’t claim to be a genius, but hell, most of peoples maintainability comments about Perl are either due to Perl 4 experiences or shotty programmers if you ask me. Sure, I enjoy an occasional game of golf, but I like writing code that tends to explain itself.
Perl, the worst thing I can say about it is autovivification isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and you quickly learn how to skip reading error messages and just go proof read your syntax. That’s kind of a downside of perl, to track down errors in Perl code, you kind of need to learn proof reading ;).
I like using my brain more than a debugger, but kind of like compilers that report useful info. I ain’t met many that actually do.
Since I haven’t much to do right now, aside from cursing at portmaster and dealing with libintl problems >_>, I’ve spent a bit of time importing my journal entries from Aug ’09. Now that I look at it, I actually began the move from Live Journal to Blogger back in December, and I’ve still got two months worth of entries to go before all is done :-S.
Well, this is a wee bit of progress on my task list: July 2009 is finally imported from Live Journal to Blogger. I’ve only got August, (most of) September, and October left to go, and then my Jounral will have completed the transition!!! I’ve over 1500 entries from the LJ days, plus out of the ~1460 entries here on Blogger, this would be about the 142nd entry for 2010 alone.
I’ve noticed that I tend to average, around 40 entries a month, and 20 during ‘slow’ seasons. Hmm, just think how many log files I’ve saved on these past four years…
A little fun with RSS
In a bit of experimentation, I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the way a certain popular web platform plays with the services I utilise. So, today I began playing with two new toys: FeedBurner and Yahoo! Pipes.
Feed burner offers a bit better control over ones RSS feeds, than most web services that I’ve encountered do; in particular, much better than both Live Journal and Blogger. For what it’s worth, I’ve converted my blogger feed over to the burner, allowing me to trivially add a few things to the feeds without disturbing any existing subscribers. The main difference, is now I can tweak things for stuff that I feed my journals RSS into, hehehe.
One downside of FeedBurner, is that its ability to merge feeds with the “Link Spicer” feature is quite limited. In particular, it’s little value beyond a limited set of common services. Enter Yahoo! Pipes: using it, I was able to (trivially) munge together several of my service feeds into a singular one, e.g. combing several photo album steams into one pipe. I’ve created several feeds, that I doubt anyone will be interested in; but allow me to route selected information sources into RSS aware entities.
Although Really Simple Syndication has been around for more or less, a solid decade: few people understand it’s true value. Properly managed, web feeds whether built on RSS or not, can achieve part of that interoperability that certain keyword jugglers puddle about with XML, and it’s been here for years. If you want to cram steams of data somewhere, odds are you should be looking to see if some type of web feed will fit the bill, rather then throwing together yet another obscure XML format to juggle. Bonus points include that decent libraries are already available, which can save some time and make easier to read web app code later ^_^.
Journal make over
If anyone notices very strange occurrences here, don’t worry—it’s the result of developing a custom theme ;).
Last night I took the liberty of configuring Blogger to notify me by E-mail whenever comments are made here, dang, Live Journal did spoil me with all the notification features! Blogger however seems a smoother platform to rely on, my only real complaint is the site templates. One of these days I’ve gotta take some time and create the look / feel site design I want, which is much easier to do here (for free) then paying Live Journal for their equivalent level of control.
After being notified of a comment made today on one of last weeks entries, I also searched through a few pages of posts just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. My apologies if I’ve missed any comments left between 2010-01-30 and 2009-11-13. It’s rare anyone actually leaves a comment lol.
Been in/out all morning, but finally woke up around 11:15R, from a dream best described as interesting but alarming :-S. Less then ten minutes passed before the aggravatory pouncing began, and it was less then 15 minutes before I was officially enlisted for slave duty again :-(.
It’s like everyones a big bird with radar…
On the upside, I’ve managed to transfer all the Live Journal entries from January 2009 into Blogger. Really, I hope to have everything transferred before 2010, lol, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I’ve made about 36 posts on Blogger since the beginning, not counting the moved posting. Live Journal says I’ve made 1537 entries (counting that one), and blogger gives my grand total here as 1,076 posts. So, there is about 498 posts to transfer over, Feb-Oct 2009 and part of Nov. 2009.
After that, the new roost will be ready for a party, muahuhauaha!