Happy birthday, journal

4 Comments

I began this journal four years ago. I appear to have posted about 2150 entries since then; averaging about one and a half entries a day over that whole period.

(And as you can see from that first entry, I've drastically changed the interface over time. Apparently at one time I thought it was a good idea to put a series of full entries on a page, with the most recent entry at the bottom. Weird. I'm especially amused that in my second entry, I wrote: "I think most of the time I'll have a series of shortish entries each day rather than long ones." Hah!)

I've been hoping that I could mark the occasion by pointing you to the new Movable Type version of the journal, but I've still got a couple things to iron out—mostly figuring out how permissions work for commenters. (The MT version is currently set up in its default configuration, in which all comments by unauthenticated users are held for approval. I want to look into its authentication mechanisms—I'm especially intrigued by this "OpenID" thing—before I decide to turn that off; if it turns out to be easy and transparent for regular commenters to automatically authenticate on arrival (without having to do anything complicated or difficult), I might keep it this way. But most likely I'll decide that the pros of letting anyone post comments outweigh the cons.)

Anyway, I also need to set things up so that internal links to other journal entries within my journal continue to work; that's gonna be a little tricky. (I'm transferring all the old entries to the new system, of course. Though I suppose—I just thought of this—that I could just leave the old entries in place and start over with the new system. That would lose continuity, but it would mean that existing entries would keep their PageRank; the loss of PageRank is one of the things that makes me sad about converting. And it would mean I wouldn't have to write the slightly tricky PHP/MySQL code to handle the redirection when someone follows an external link to an old entry.)

So, probably a few more days before I open it up to the public. At which point I'll probably continue to post here for a little longer while people try out the new place and let me know about problems; then at some point I'll shut things down here and make the switch.

4 Responses to “Happy birthday, journal”

  1. Nao

    I’ve played a little with the OpenID thing with LiveJournal, and it seems quite straightforward. It’s mildly more complicated the first time you use it with a site, but after that, not so much.

    Basically, if I wanted to authenticate on your new MT setup, all I would need to to is plug the URL of my LJ into the OpenID field of your comments. The very first time I did that, it would send me to a page at LJ asking me if I want to let your site ask if I’m logged in at LJ. I’d say yes, always, and from then on, whenever I used my LJ URL in your comments, MT would authenticate me by asking LJ if I was logged in using the same computer. All I would need to do is type in my URL, no password. Clear as mud?

    When I played with it using my LJ and the OpenID wiki, I found that it was one of those things that sounds far more complicated than it really is.

    One thing it means for you is that you can, if you so choose, get rid of your LJ account, and set up an OpenID account from kith.org which you can use to comment and read your friends list at LJ. I don’t see any real advantage to this. On the other hand, you could let the people whose journals you host set up OpenIDs, and then they could do that if they don’t currently have an LJ.

    I wrote up a fairly long post on my LJ back in June.

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  2. Nao

    I should say that if it’s an either-or choice between using OpenID and allowing unauthenticated comments, I don’t think I’d go the OpenID route.

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  3. SarahP

    Happy B’Day, Jed’s journal!

    Oh, and I’m sorry about taking up all that comment space with the OED entry the other day.

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  4. Lola

    Apparently, JournalScape is not one of the sites that is OpenID authenticated, so we JournalScape users have to comment as “Anonymous” on LJ and other OpenID sites. At least that’s what I’ve had to do so far, although if somebody knows something I don’t, I’d love to know it.

    Ergh. Pardon the poor English construction. I’ve been teaching all day. My brain has turned to mush, or at least mush-like substance of indeterminate color.

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