Journaling rant

Why are there no blog sites out there that I actually like?

Lots of sites have one or two features that I like, but are missing some major component that I consider critical. My "critical" list includes:

The ability to tag or categorize posts, and then view them by category.

The ability to "subscribe" to a given journal and get emails when something is posted to it. I hate having to remember to check different sites all the time.

The ability to get an email when someone posts a comment on one of my posts.

The ability to get an email when someone posts a comment on someone else's post that I'm interested in. (I.e., the ability to "watch" given topic in someone else's journal.)

The ability to limit who can view certain posts, or certain categories.

LiveJournal comes *so* close. But I despise the way they handle "friends". Why can't I just have a list of my friends, and get emails when some (but not necessarily all) of them post? (If you look at my Friends page, you'll note that a good 75% of the posts are from one person. And while I like her a lot, sometimes it would be nice to be able to find the rest of the posts too.)

I'd happily pay to use a site that had all of the "criticals" covered (LJ wants $20 a year for their premium service, which adds none of the criticals and a bunch of stuff I don't care about in the slightest. I'd pay twice that for a site that did what I wanted.) But I've spent a goodly number of hours looking for one (more time than I care to admit to, really), and it's just not there. The closest is WordPress plus a couple of plugins, but all of the hosting sites that use WordPress don't use plugins. So now I'm looking at the hassle of setting up and maintaining the software. I'm trying to get things OFF my servers, not put more on. And even then-- I have no guarantee that the plugins actually work as expected.

Oh, and one "nice" but not "critical"-- bloxster.net allows you to have multiple journals under one login. I like that; it's like "categories" but on steroids (individual entries can have categories, too. But there's zero mail capability).

Today I am journal-cranky.

Journaling rant

Why are there no blog sites out there that I actually like?

Lots of sites have one or two features that I like, but are missing some major component that I consider critical. My "critical" list includes:

The ability to tag or categorize posts, and then view them by category.

The ability to "subscribe" to a given journal and get emails when something is posted to it. I hate having to remember to check different sites all the time.

The ability to get an email when someone posts a comment on one of my posts.

The ability to get an email when someone posts a comment on someone else's post that I'm interested in. (I.e., the ability to "watch" given topic in someone else's journal.)

The ability to limit who can view certain posts, or certain categories.

LiveJournal comes *so* close. But I despise the way they handle "friends". Why can't I just have a list of my friends, and get emails when some (but not necessarily all) of them post? (If you look at my Friends page, you'll note that a good 75% of the posts are from one person. And while I like her a lot, sometimes it would be nice to be able to find the rest of the posts too.)

I'd happily pay to use a site that had all of the "criticals" covered (LJ wants $20 a year for their premium service, which adds none of the criticals and a bunch of stuff I don't care about in the slightest. I'd pay twice that for a site that did what I wanted.) But I've spent a goodly number of hours looking for one (more time than I care to admit to, really), and it's just not there. The closest is WordPress plus a couple of plugins, but all of the hosting sites that use WordPress don't use plugins. So now I'm looking at the hassle of setting up and maintaining the software. I'm trying to get things OFF my servers, not put more on. And even then-- I have no guarantee that the plugins actually work as expected.

Oh, and one "nice" but not "critical"-- bloxster.net allows you to have multiple journals under one login. I like that; it's like "categories" but on steroids (individual entries can have categories, too. But there's zero mail capability).

Today I am journal-cranky.

Information overload

In my latest entry, I whined about how various journals don't have the full feature-set I want (not even if I pay them, which I am willing to do).

The reason I'm looking for a journal that does what I want is because I'm trying, without much success, to thin out a lot of the cruft in my life. I want to be able to put everything in one place. And then I want to be able to find what I'm looking for, even years later. So far, my success rate on that is zero.

And I'm not just talking about journal entries here. I'm talking about... everything, really. Over the years I've collected a whole bunch of stuff that's been set aside for "later". Since I've been on the 'net a long time, a good portion of it is digital, but not all of it-- as I was cleaning my desk at home and filing papers, I ran across a file folder labelled "Recipes". It's full of recipes I'd like to try someday, but didn't quite get around to. It is stuffed to the gills, and nothing in it is less than 5 years old. I started the file while still living with my mother, which makes it about 12 - 15 years old. Yes, that's right, I've carted around a file folder full of recipes I have never used and probably will never use for over a decade. I'm sure there's some great recipes in there, but at this point I'd have to wade through so much crap to find them, it's not worth the effort.

I pitched that folder, and every so often I am tempted to do the same to a lot of the digital "stuff" that I have lying around in various folders, on various servers, with various usernames. Except that I recently went nuts trying to find two files that I *know* I had multiple copies of... somewhere. After three days of futile searching, I gave up and spent another day and a half re-creating the files. But it's not the same, and I liked the first version better.

Work emails are even worse. Since we complete orders based on emails received from customers, we keep those emails as a policy (it solves a lot of the "I didn't ask for that, and I don't want to pay for that" problems when we can forward back their exact words). But we get a LOT of email. My "storage" contains about 15,000 emails. Finding the right one is painful, at best. And that's if I can actually find it.

Gmail helps considerably for personal email, but it has its limitations. I get the whole "labels vs folders" thing, but I want sub-labels, just like I can have sub-folders in normal systems. I want to be able to split a "conversation" into two different conversations, because a lot of my friends get sidetracked easily. And since I dumped a lot of old emails into Gmail, I have 5000 unread, unlabelled messages in my Inbox. So there's still a lot of overload there. (Plus: if you "bounce" a message to another address, most mail systems will use the timestamp of the original message-- that's the point of "bouncing" rather than "forwarding". Gmail uses the timestamp from when you bounced it, which totally screws up my dates.)

What I really want; what I lust after in my heart, is one "away" for work items, and one "away" for personal items. And then really good, really consistent backups for both.

Information overload

In my latest entry, I whined about how various journals don't have the full feature-set I want (not even if I pay them, which I am willing to do).

The reason I'm looking for a journal that does what I want is because I'm trying, without much success, to thin out a lot of the cruft in my life. I want to be able to put everything in one place. And then I want to be able to find what I'm looking for, even years later. So far, my success rate on that is zero.

And I'm not just talking about journal entries here. I'm talking about... everything, really. Over the years I've collected a whole bunch of stuff that's been set aside for "later". Since I've been on the 'net a long time, a good portion of it is digital, but not all of it-- as I was cleaning my desk at home and filing papers, I ran across a file folder labelled "Recipes". It's full of recipes I'd like to try someday, but didn't quite get around to. It is stuffed to the gills, and nothing in it is less than 5 years old. I started the file while still living with my mother, which makes it about 12 - 15 years old. Yes, that's right, I've carted around a file folder full of recipes I have never used and probably will never use for over a decade. I'm sure there's some great recipes in there, but at this point I'd have to wade through so much crap to find them, it's not worth the effort.

I pitched that folder, and every so often I am tempted to do the same to a lot of the digital "stuff" that I have lying around in various folders, on various servers, with various usernames. Except that I recently went nuts trying to find two files that I *know* I had multiple copies of... somewhere. After three days of futile searching, I gave up and spent another day and a half re-creating the files. But it's not the same, and I liked the first version better.

Work emails are even worse. Since we complete orders based on emails received from customers, we keep those emails as a policy (it solves a lot of the "I didn't ask for that, and I don't want to pay for that" problems when we can forward back their exact words). But we get a LOT of email. My "storage" contains about 15,000 emails. Finding the right one is painful, at best. And that's if I can actually find it.

Gmail helps considerably for personal email, but it has its limitations. I get the whole "labels vs folders" thing, but I want sub-labels, just like I can have sub-folders in normal systems. I want to be able to split a "conversation" into two different conversations, because a lot of my friends get sidetracked easily. And since I dumped a lot of old emails into Gmail, I have 5000 unread, unlabelled messages in my Inbox. So there's still a lot of overload there. (Plus: if you "bounce" a message to another address, most mail systems will use the timestamp of the original message-- that's the point of "bouncing" rather than "forwarding". Gmail uses the timestamp from when you bounced it, which totally screws up my dates.)

What I really want; what I lust after in my heart, is one "away" for work items, and one "away" for personal items. And then really good, really consistent backups for both.