Touched by the hand of goatse.

[reddragdiva]

I am on holiday. I think this means I get to sleep. Wrists still unhappy. Yesterday I wrote my first-ever Perl CGI! (A hideously hacky MoinMoin to MediaWiki syntax converter. There are no good Moin->MW scripts, as anyone who needs one will do the job precisely once and try never again to speak of it.)

As of January I'm on a cheap bastard's account because I'm not giving SUP any of my money, particularly as they got all the stupid people from SixApart to run LiveJournal. Six icons, 750 friends list. Fun! (Please don't pay it for me — I could pay it myself, but they really don't deserve a penny related to me.) Perhaps I shall do a WordPress also-post-here solution like blarglefiend or ptomblin_lj's.

I'm in a burnt-out mood with a headache. Humour me on this one:

[Poll #1109405]

p.s.: Freda is so cute.

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

I think this means I get to sleep.

You have a small child, so I think not.

[reddragdiva]

At least she's really good.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking of letting my paid account expire too. Which leads me to the next question, are there any decent alternatives out there?

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Now I'm having horrible thoughts of setting up my own LJ instance and hacking something up to gate posts and comments between them.

(But I don't have to put my not-money where my mouth is until next June or so.)

[gths.livejournal.com]

Fortunately and unfortunately I don't have to pay them any more money.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

According to http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=61 , the limit for free accounts is 1000 friends? (I'm sure it used to be 750, maybe they updated it recently.)

I too have recently let my account expire into a cheap bastard's account. I must say, I'm disappointed to see how many of my friends have sold out to a cheap bastard's plus account (Brad's insistence that people will only see ads if they opt in looks quite laughable now).

[reddragdiva]

The LiveJournal blogging engine is pretty mediocre as a blogging engine. The whole point is the social network. WordPress is an actual blogging engine and quite manageable if you can cope with a command line.

[reddragdiva]

Damn, I don't get to do a drastic and unexpected cull!

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I've never paid for it. hazyjayne once bought me 2 months paid, which was sweet, but I never really used any of the features, so I was not so sad when it ended. The only thing I'd like to have is the ability to create polls but, as you said, I'm not paying those buggers a penny.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

How can you not have written a perl cgi in N years of sysadminhood? Boggle.

[reddragdiva]

Precisely. I have managed to evade actual programming beyond dodgy shell scripts in the thirteen years since I did really well in my C on VMS course.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

The network is the real strength of LJ, not the mechanism. You'd be hard pressed to replicate it...

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

OMG NO DRAMA! How will we survive the season of goodwill and cheer?

[reddragdiva]

Hence the attraction of a Wordpress installation (total personal control - and is generally available with cheap web hosting these days) that feeds to an LJ (not just a syndicated feed).

[pndc.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's easy. Sysadmins almost never need to build an actual dynamic web page from scratch because some other sucker will have written it already, and therefore it can be found via Google and misappropriated.

Remember, laziness is a virtue when writing Perl, and so it is the height of virtue to not bother to write any at all.

[reddragdiva]

I promise, I cargo-culted shamelessly. Added points for mixing software licenses such that your work is legally impossible to release.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Back In The Day the paid accounts ran off different servers than the free accounts. So paying meant a huge difference in access - the free user servers were always so jammed it often wasn't possible to log in at all.

Once they threw everybody together there stopped being any really compelling reasons to pay other than moral righteousness. Since Six Apart took over even that reasoning has pretty much gone up in smoke.