Y halo thar next yr's Yuletide request

Forgive Durden Presents Razia's Shadow: A Musica for $3.99 this week as an Amazon MP3 album

So, uh, bandom had a musical. I don't quite understood why disaster befell in this story (I've only listened to it twice) but, um, yes. I like very much. I feel like there are enough P(!)atD people on my flist that I feel I should have heard of this; Brendon Urie has two songs on it.

Alternately, you can currently stream it at purevolume.

Not yet time for an epicaricacy egg cream

As you may have heard elsewhere, LJ today laid off a large portion of its staff. Alarmingly, they did so without providing a severance package (or more than a week's notice), which speaks to fairly dire financial straits. (The Valleywag report that it was more than half the staff is wrong, but it was also far above the near customary Silicon Valley 10%, also.)

While this has had the salubrious effect of refocusing Mark and Denise on getting Dreamwidth functional, the estimated time to launch is still Not All That Soon Actually.

nmg has compiled a list of LJ back up tools, reproduced below:

• ljArchive (Windows only, archives entries and comments)
• ljmigrate (needs python, archives entries, comments and userpics)
• ljdump (needs python, archives entries and comments)
• LJBook (produces PDF of your LJ, currently overwhelmed)
• LiveJournal Backup (Windows only, archives entries and comments)
• LJSM (needs perl, archives entries, comments, memories, userpics, other images)
• jbackup (needs perl, archives entries and comments)
• LiveJournal Export (month by month as XML, archives entries only)
• LJ-SEC (.NET/Windows only) (archives entries)
• xjournal (Mac only) archives entries

If it says perl or python, it can work with Mac or Linux with minor amounts of fiddling. Also, if you post with a client, double-check its features. I use Logjam and make backups of my entries on a monthly basis with it.

I've seen at least one report that LJArchive is being bounced, so I think I'll just make a note to backup with one of these tools (comments! comments forever!) for my next scheduled backup on 2/1. If you haven't been making backups, you still might want to wait until the end of the week to get yours.

One cautionary note: ljdump, at least, does not archive the edited version of a comment it has already archived. I do not know if the other archive programs have the same issue, but from the description of the problem (live on LJ compare w/ archived w/ ljdump) I suspect that they do. It does gracefully pick up the edits to an entry.

ETA: added xjournal from neverneverfic, lj-sec from googling. Also, in the next post, someone mentions that LJarchive and ljmigrate can archive entries to communities. They cannot archive comments to communities, a limitation imposed by LJ.

Re: LJ firing

Dear fandom:

Please to hold back on the panic.

Did you know that there are still people who have their primary fannish internet interaction on Usenet? (For the unfamiliar: Usenet is a bit like an old-fashioned Bulletin Board and a bit like an enormous collection of mailing lists.) Livejournal is a tool. It is not fandom, and if it bites the dust, we will find new tools.

What should you do right now?

1) Backup your LJ, as discussed in the previous post. You should probably also make copies of any posts you made on communities that you want to be sure and preserve: e.g. story posts to communities, newbieguide posts, crack_van posts, ship_manifesto. If you don't own the community, you'll have to do this piecemeal, sadly. (If you are a community maintainer, you may want to consider backing up your whole community, which, if I understand it correctly, ljsm will capture the posts (although possibly not the comments?).
<ETA> I am informed in the comments that both LJArchive and ljmigrate will archive some amount of posts to communities. It's not clear if it's all posts or just your posts, nor whether it includes any locked posts or not. </ETA>
<ETA2>Any entries you can see, ljarchive and ljsm can archive.</ETA2>

2) Be prepared, in the event of failure, to move to a new blog. If you have your own webspace, wordpress looks pretty good. (If you were particularly ambitious, or not fond of wp, you might go to the trouble of converting to wordpress and then, from there, to drupal or movable type or some other powerhorse CMS.) If you do not have your own webspace, and do not wish to use insanejournal, Blog2Blog supports migration from livejournal to Windows Live and Blogger (i.e. blogspot.)

3) Get familiar with RSS and OpenID. In the event that LJ implodes, RSS will allow you to fake having a friends list, and OpenID will give you a consistent identity around the web.

You can either pick from the scads of RSS clients to use on your computer, or use a web-based reader to recreate that logging into your friends list feel. It is entirely possible to read flocked livejournal posts from rss, although you have to make sure that, if you are using an online reader, (a) it supports authenticated feeds and (b) you trust it to secure your account data and not make public your feeds in some way. NewsGator Online, bloglines, and netvibes reportedly support authenticated feeds. Google reader does not, although there is a Yahoo! Pipes work around.

You have an OpenID from Livejournal, Insanejournal, Journalfen, and probably any other lj-based website you are associated with. You also have one from AOL Instant messenger (openid.aol.com/screenname), Blogger (blogname.blogspot.com), Typekey (profile.typepad.com/username), and Yahoo! (setup at openid.yahoo.com). There are many, many other websites foaming at the mouth to give you an openid, although your best bet is probably to delegate your openid to your own webpage.

4) Get contact info for the people you really do want to follow on their way out the door. Give contact info to the people you think want to know about the things you're doing.

At one point, I thought that someone had created an automated directory, where people could say, "This is my LJ account, and I am also known at these other URLs." in case of an extended LJ outage or move (I think it pre-dated strikethrough, but was popularized by it), but damned if I can find the website now or remember what it was called.

<ETA> stewardess remembered. It's http://www.fandom411.com/ and one manually adds one's information to it. Also, you may want to consider becoming a user at fanlore, which, in edition to letting you correct the history of why exactly every single Ghost Soup fan falls into tears at the words "Angela's giant head", also gives you a place to tell people exactly who you are, at length. </ETA>

In any case, now is the time to make sure you know who your friends are and how to reach them outside of an LJ private message. (Oh, BTW, did you know that LJ now includes the text of the PM in the notification e-mail for a PM? I encourage everyone to stop using screened comments to communicate hidden info right this second. Get it PM'd, confirm you got the e-mail, and delete the PM. Much better.)

5) Relax. LJ is not going down tomorrow. It's not going down for the foreseeable future, although it may become a less fan-friendly place, as development is moving to Russia (and, I infer, focus on the needs of Russian bloggers, which are not at all the needs of fandom.) Lots of Silicon Valley shops are firing some people without collapsing, because, hello, major global economic crisis is actual reason for some and convenient excuse for others. You've got time to figure out what sort of new personal publishing platform you might like, and what newsreader corrects all those niggling flaws in the flist you've ignored for years, and whether that girl who you friended five years ago who never comments is a friend or an enemy. Just chill, people. Chill.