Not meaning to nag, but the only upsaid people I've heard from since I moved are Mel and bardroid. Where are the rest of you? Lurking is okay, just, y'know, I'd hate to lose you just coz I moved. If you use a feed reader for convenience you can add mine (tho it's only "extract" and doesn't show images).

Catch you later, yeah?

By forcing myself to get on with it I have finally finished copying entries to the new site. I haven't copied all of them, since some are relevant only to the Upsaid incarnation of this journal, but the important stuff is there. It shouldn't have taken 5 weeks but it did because I am too easily distracted (and/or I spend too much time playing Tetris).

The site itself is still "in progress" because I need to tweak the template a little more (such as to put in twixt-entry navigation, that being something not available here and one of the reasons I decided to move). Also I have 10 entries in draft, four of those being ones that should have been posted up to two weeks ago for the sake of continuity... Gah.

It's a wordpress installation, so it's kinda like diary-x in that I can opt to have some entries passworded, and some of them are, but the only one you need to worry about for the moment is the one called "putting my foot down" and you should email me for the password if you want to read it - mg(at)do(dash)while(dot)org. You are encouraged to register, since some entries will later be available only to logged-in readers. Registering and being logged-in also saves you typing time when commenting. Oh, and all comments are screened for the time being.

I shall try, I really will, to get the entries up-to-date asap, and to write reasonably regularly hereafter. There is an rss feed if you want it - just click the feed icon - but I'm limiting feed as "excerpt only" and it won't display inline images. Anyway, you'll be wanting the new address? :)   do-while.org/wordpress.

Due to my ingrained paranoia, I will be moving this site... eventually. The destination exists, but transferring entries is a slow and boring process, and I'm inclined to lose interest and go off and read the paper instead. For some reason I think that people will be mad at me for moving - or is that just my paranoia squeaking again?

I put in a support request and David has addressed the URL issue, but he can't promise to satisfy my other craving, which is for twixt-entry navigation ("previous" and "next" links) on the permalink aka comments pages. I've always been most strident on this issue, that it should be possible to move between entries as one natively moves between pages when reading a book, and I am rather surprised at myself that I overlooked this basic requirement when I signed up (I don't remember exactly but I probably thought it was in the templating system somewhere, I just had to find it).

Since this is primarily a journal it's important, imo, to be able to read entries in chronological order (that is, from the beginning, moving forward), without having to scroll back-and-forth in an archive that is presented in weblog format (earlier entries at the bottom). It can be done on an entry-by-entry basis, but either I have to list all my entries on the archive page or people have to increment the URL manually and load the next page that way. Both ways are clunky and a waste of space and time respectively. It's not even a matter of simple convenience (and goodness knows everybody's lazy these days - "no comment form, no feedback" kinda thing, as if email didn't exist any more) - it's basic courtesy, not making it a pain in the ass to go to the next item. It's like being forced to read a book backwards, a page at a time, and between each page you have to close the book and put it down for a second, and you're not allowed to mark the page you just read.

Anyway... I probably wouldn't care so much about this matter at this time if it weren't for worrying about the patience of former readers who I hope are reading here now (those who expressed an interest and I told them, as it were, where to go (heh)). They are probably more interested in my life (diary entries) than my occasional bloggy output, so it makes sense they would want to start at the beginning... Yeah? But there's no easy way for them to progress from the beginning. So they are probably annoyed, and quite possibly putting off reading until they have a free week or two (no offense, guys).

When I opened this account I selected "public profile", though I have since disabled that on the basis of there not being that many active users here, so when I add a new entry, I sit on the "Recently Updated" list on the front page for far too long (anything longer than 3-5 minutes is outside my comfort zone). To me, having a public profile should be separate from whether I appear in "Recently Updated", but I realise it hasn't been programmed that way and if I don't want to be linked on the front page I need to hide my profile.

The other thing I did was enable pinging to weblogs.com, but that was before I realised it had become a Verisign site. I don't like this, nor the way they have changed how the front page displays (bloody annoying scrolling list that moves too fast for me), so I've disabled that now as well. I decided to use the ping service at blo.gs instead, only to find it's been acquired by Yahoo!, and since I have been in dispute with them for over 5 years about my former Geocities site, I boycott their services as a matter of principle (except where unavoidable, eg Yahoo Groups).

So I went to the Weblog Compendium to find something similar that I didn't find objectionable, and thought it might be prudent to join only one to start with, and see if anything significant happened to my traffic in the first week (less is better at this stage, imo). I decided to try Blog Catalog, and signed up. I was very surprised to be added almost straight away (it's human-monitored rather than automated, which I like), but then scared witless when, while searching their directory for a blog I saw fleetingly on another service but couldn't remember the URL of, my listing popped up on a page with only about 12 blogs total. That makes me far too easy to find. So... what... I have to remove all of my tag/keywords to make it harder to be found there? Because if it's that easy for my site to come up when I'm not even looking for it, it'll be too easy for Q to find. Even Mister could stumble across it quite innocently.

Oh, look, am I being too paranoid? Probably. But, dammit, I want ONE place online where I can speak freely. I've tried so many times to keep a blog/diary where I say what I really mean instead of euphemising or being hopelessly cryptic. Why share at all? Because I believe that it will help someone, someday, to read of my experiences and relate somehow, or they may be inspired to find a solution, or even just be entertained... but I choose to share with strangers, not people who already think they know me (no disrespect intended to Q or Mister). I can't share everything with RL peeps. It's just too confronting, and they can misunderstand, or abuse the information (unwittingly or not). I really need to write an entry specifically on this subject, to try to get it out of my system a little, at least.

Worst-case-scenario I suppose would be I'd have to password this so it wasn't readily accessible. No directory listings, then. What I'd really like is a "share with friends" option, where I can say which of my Upsaid "buddies" I want to have access, and they can automatically read while logged in. Sigh. I don't know. I'm not sure. But I've kinda got the feeling Blog Catalog is not really what I want, and I may have to quit it in a day or two, just for peace-of-mind.