We Have Moved (Again)

00.00, Wed 19th Mar

There's always been a saying in these parts: if you want a job done properly, do it yourself. During the recent, prolonged, system outage, we determined a method to do the job ourselves, and that has now become our preferred secure space.

Readers will now find us at the private sub-blog on a space we host ourselves, a space where system outages and funding are Our Problem.

Time to put up, not shut up.

11.40, Sun 2nd Jul

In the past, I've railed long and hard about the inability of Six Apart to honour the community contract it inherited when it bought Livejournal at the start of 2005. April's attempt to tell people what software they might run on their computer was the last straw, the point beyond which my patience with Six Apart finally snapped.

This raised the question, where do I go next? Some things just don't fit into a publicly-accessible geekery 'n' politics blog, that much is clear. So, again, where do I go next?

Somewhere that is clearly better than Livejournal. No commercials would be very good. Being large enough to implement geographic co-location is an advantage, but so is being small enough to be under one person's overview. Offering more than the free Livejournal account won't hurt, but value-for-no-money is not my primary criterion. Respecting my privacy, that would be the right thing to do, so a European site beats anything over the Atlantic.

I've looked at a list of Livejournal installations:

Greatest Journal? Bunch of advertising Yankees, more than enough to outweigh an awful lot of features. Who needs 10 zillion avatars, anyway?
Dead Journal? Well, ditto.
Blurty? Ditto again.
Caledia? Promising, but it's United-station.
Minilog? Looks good, looks British, but anyone who hides their terms of service behind a Javascript wall is not going to get my vote.
Journalfen? Specific for meeja types. And Californish.
Sviesta Ciba? Bonus points for being Latvian, but two weeks listening to Marie N for having a missing terms of service document.

Eventually, Iziblog proved to be the least worst option. It's small, fewer than 5000 accounts. No commercials, a slightly more powerful implementation. And it's an incomplete French translation, which isn't a problem for me, and might deter the freedom-hating passer-by.

Edit: I'm advised that this implementation uses G****e ads. Another reason to install and run noscript - I've never seen the buggers.

Lochjournal users are able to create a new profile by hacking about with the quser.lj file in the DB directory. Other clients may also work, I cannot say for sure.

Mood: accomplished

Annotate.