Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Today, before my computer desk came within a gnat's breath (or breadth) of utterly collapsing on me, I signed up for DW and copied my LJ account over. I was able to keep my LJ user name, which was spiffy. I also configured cross-posting. I need to see if I can post on LJ and it'll appear on DW...

I did a little research and learned a few things. First, LJ and its kin, have a very interesting (and somewhat scary!) feature: they're mainly written in Perl! I've done some coding in Perl, and to the person who does not fully immerse themselves in Perl and live in it as their daily language, Perl is a nasty piece of work. For those who are so immersed, it's an amazingly powerful language that can put most other languages to shame. So my deep respect to those who maintain sites like this.

But there's something else that really impressed me: the majority of this site is maintained by women coders! GO GIRLS! And because of that, they have a significant number of all women coders employed! I think that is totally awesome, and because of the smoothness of my transfer, they are definitely getting some of my bucks for a paid account (starting next week when I get my next unemployment check).

So why did I switch blogging platforms? The first migration from LJ to DW and IJ and others happened years ago over a fear of certain communities getting censored or purged. I did not hear of that actually happening. It might have happened and I just didn't hear about it, I don't know. A long time ago the ownership of LJ changed, then again, and ultimately ended up in Russian hands. More recently, the server farm moved entirely to within Russian borders.

Is this a problem for non-Russian people? Hard to say. Putin's people have been very heavy-handed when it comes to quashing dissent against news and people whom they do not like. But the world is changing. This could become a problem, and being caught without a backup is just silly, both at the loss of a decade of posts and at the loss of connections of people whom I've proverbially met around the world. I don't want to risk that. So the best thing to do is to set up a second account.

The move was absolutely painless and it processed quickly. I have ten years of posts on LJ: 3900 posts, 8700 comments received. I don't want to lose that. I actually dig in to that occasionally. It took very little time, and as far as I can see, was 100% complete. All of the comments are listed like "thewayne.livejournal.com". I do have some things to review, specifically photos. I expect everything with external links are fine, but anything that I posted with internal links I'll have to look at.

Anyway, here I am, and we'll see how this goes!