it's not the same moon in the sky

Tuesday morning links roundup

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 11:48:51 GMT

I have tabs to close, and miles to go before I... shower.

People trying to boost their DW/LJ flists might be interested in a couple of friending memes: mapping_stars is hosting a New Year's Friending Meme, and there's also a yuletide-specific one here.

Meanwhile, ruuger's come up with the perfect meme for people trying to post more often:

When you see this, make a post in your journal or in a community. It can be anything: a crosspost something you've posted on Tumblr, a few words about the last thing you read/watched, or just a "Hi, how is everyone?" Then go read your f-list and leave at least one comment.

She also pointed me to the snowflake_challenge, which still has a week to run and is a fun way to get to know more people/do more in fandom generally.

Reading-wise, jesuswasbatman has come up with "Doctor Who: A Guide For The Overwhelmed", a great, approachable primer on the televisual history of Doctor Who's different eras/Doctors/production teams: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

The vc_media Queen of the Damned group read schedule is up! Still need input from someone who has the US Ballantine paperback to hand to check page numbers...

Sad news this morning is that The Last Ship is to close on Broadway, though apparently they have hopes for licensing, so we might yet get to see it here... /nurtures fragile hope

ETA: This is too hilarious not to share: Ted Turner's Doomsday video has surfaced (or, as I suspect, has been circulating for some time, but has now splashed on my particular internet shore again). It was intended to be played in the event of... well, the end of the world. Unfortunately for our household, we just rewatched Mars Attacks last night, and this feels like a cut scene from that movie...

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Wednesday reading

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 23:58:57 GMT

It's been a while since I've done this, so here's about two months' worth of reading, or at least the ones I can remember:

( I gave up on a lot of books in this period, but some stuck... )

Also interesting (and found via author_by_night): some people are organising a Harry Potter fandom reunion on LJ, for those who miss fandom as we did it in the old pre-Tumblr days, want to reconnect with the larger fandom, etc. etc: hp_reunion.

And here's a post from strannik01 about how LJ themselves seem to be doing some sensible outreach at long last - they've got a brand new ad on YouTube which does some smart stuff by focusing on how customisable privacy levels are, the comment threading and the strength of the site being discussion. Also, they underline the fact you can use any nickname and will never have to disclose your RL info if you don't want to; and the fact they will never filter your feed content (one in the eye for Facebook and, most recently, Twitter). I would love to see this working out for them, I really would, because while all the other social networks have strengths, LJ and Dreamwidth combine the greatest number of aspects I like with the fewest irksome aspects. And it's just the style in which I most enjoy interacting with people and having a -cough- online presence.

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LiveJournal actually appears to be changing its attitude to users...

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 21:45:44 GMT

So, something seems to be brewing at LiveJournal. They recently made a post responding to people's criticisms of the latest release, in which they admitted:

"We know that things changing abruptly can be frustrating, and that we don't have the greatest track record when it comes to making changes based on your feedback. We're working on changing that, and want you to know that we are taking all of your feedback on the redesign very seriously, and will be making changes based on it."

Since then, they've reinstated the lj_feedback community, and posted a survey actually asking questions they should've asked a long time ago - why we use LJ, what we like about it, what it has that other sites don't (as opposed to "what features from totally different sites can we copy in a marketing-driven panic"). Now, for a long time LJ has been very low on my list of "Sites I would trust" (an unfortunate combination with "Site that feels the most like home"), but this is an interesting change. My comment to them is here.

The tone of these recent communications is so different that I suspect some kind of staffing change - any time I've had utterly shit service longterm in healthcare contexts (be it the NHS or manufacturers of equipment I use), the thing that has changed it has been when a new manager came in and started poking about in all the disasters and cock-ups she'd inherited from her predecessor. LJ-wise, I suspect that user numbers had begun to fall catastrophically in the Russian market that they've focused on in the last while - no internet landscape is static and presumably users there are getting pissed off by the various LJ problems and moving to other sites that have sprung up within Russia and internationally.

I started to really worry about LJ when the eyeroll-worthy social capital feature informed me that mine was one of the top 1000 journals on the site. I don't post that much and I don't get that many comments (this isn't meant to sound self-pitying - seriously; any site where my account is one of the more active ones is in serious trouble!). Today, my journal is the 898th most... capital, socially. Or whatever. That's fucked up, guys.

So yeah, all credit to LJ for wanting to turn the ship around - let's hope they actually manage it. I'm willing to have a little faith, but they need to work fast and keep communicating with us.

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LJ bio HTML woes, anyone?

Mon, 12 May 2014 10:29:25 GMT

Welp, I updated my profile text and apparently broke my LJ profile in the process. I'm using the same raw text there as on my DW profile where it's working fine (though obviously I've changed DW username coding where necessary), and there's only a couple of new bits of HTML there, but now the whole thing is refusing to display properly. Is anyone else having trouble with HTML in LJ bios? I don't want to bother Support if it's just one of those transient bugs, or I've made some really obvious embarrassing coding mistake:

( Code is under here, but with gaps inserted so the links won't try to link within this post. )

Here's how it's currently displaying on my LJ profile - maybe the error code is indicative of something: http://cloudsinvenice.livejournal.com/profile

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