Saturday, 25 June 2011

• Why I stopped posting here

  
  
  
  

  Site statistics indicate that somebody is reading my scribblings, so somebody might wonder why I stopped posting. In part, because I was busy, in part because this is a blog I write about what I'm doing with my other blogs (so there's a natural built-in delay), but mainly because Xanga has chosen to be a bad place to blog.

  You need only look at the title atop my blog to see what was my first source of annoyance - being unable to set the title on my own blog, without having to give up my ability to customize its look and feel. What, aside from a desire to aggravate the user, is the point of that? But we move on to things worse than that. Take a look at today's top idea. The user, with a lot of support from her peers, has asked that the blogs of users who haven't been around for a while, maybe because they're off living their lives, be destroyed, the writing and work on them wiped out, because she wants to have the staff take the usernames away from those people, and give them to her, and other, likeminded spoiled brats. Kind of like going up to the city, and asking that somebody else's home be torn down, because she'd like to have the guy's address. There are plenty of usernames at Xanga available, and if you do the Math, you'll see that there will be plenty for some time to come, but she wants what she wants when she wants it, and with other a thousand users backing her up, this service that is willing to put everything to a vote might just give it to her.

  Yes, this has been pending for a few years, but that speaks to a lack of motivation on the part of the staff, not to the presence of any common sense, and "common sense" is the applicable phrase, in this case. People read old blog posts, just like they read old books, and being read is the point of blogging. While obviously one doesn't want one's blog to wait a hundred years to find a reader, those latter day readers are still an audience, and they are still valued. A blog that is going to be knocked down the moment one is away for a while is a blog that is denied that latter day readership, and yes, that is a big deal from the blogger's point of view, if he is at all serious about what he is doing. From an economic point of view, the proposal is insane - diskspace already only cost 1/4 of a cent per Meg toward the end of the last century, and has been coming down in cost, ever since. The provider that goes along with such a request is telling its users to accept that many long hours of their work might go up in smoke the moment they stop working those many long hours, without pay, so that the staff can free up what almost certainly will never be as much as a dollar of diskspace, which would be 26,400 pages of writing, even at the elevated costs of the last century, and far more than that, now. Users will be, and should be, highly offended by such an idea. It is outrageous.

  The conclusion I came to, a few years ago, after noticing that the Xanga staff wasn't willing to publicly reject this idea and give assurances that it wouldn't be acted on, was that to establish much of a presence on Xanga, on the terms we were facing, would be foolish, and that as young as my blog was, that I could act on this observation in a timely manner. Livejournal turned out to be a disappointment, itself, given its continuing tradition of censorship, but while I was over there, I got an invitation to the far superior deadjournal, where I am today. My blog is here:

  http://joseph-dunphy.deadjournal.com/

  The functionality is not all that I would wish it to be. I can only put five links in the sidebar, and have no way of entering code there, being forced to route my visitors through an ugly, standard livejournal format profile, if I wish to share more links with those visitors, which I do. I can not upload images to Deadjournal, still having to remotely host them elsewhere, and can't embed videos. But I can also, within the limits of the law, write as I wish, because the one guy who runs Deadjournal as a labor of love is willing to tell those who (like the writer of the proposal I linked to above) have decided to scream until they get what they want, to grow up and go away. Throwing a temper tantrum, and telling the owner that you're going to hold your breath until you're blue in the face if he doesn't delete content that you don't like, just won't get you anywhere with him, if past performance is any guide. As much as I miss the photo uploading and video embedding, the lack of censorship more than makes up for those two deficiencies and more, especially since the guy is running his service out of pocket, so let's give the guy a break? And indeed, we, his users, seem to do just that. He is doing his best by us, and we appreciate that.

  Xanga can not say the same. Take a look at the code on your most recent posts, taking a close look at your outbound links. Notice how Xanga has slipped rel=nofollow in, on the sly? You don't see it when you edit your posts. You have to unrender your own page to find it, meaning while this will hurt you, grievously, in the search engine ranking, it wouldn't deter spammers, even if spammer were deterred by nofollow (which history suggests that they are not), because the spammers won't generally notice it. How many people go sifting through code? Xanga is going to harm its own users, just for the sake of proving that it can do so, and then refuse to listen when its users want to talk about the issue. How obnoxious is that? And it's been going on for a few years.

  This is why I never made a serious effort to establish a real presence on Xanga, and have no current plans to do so, ever. valuing them, as a service, would be a strange choice on my part, when they so clearly do not value me, or apparently anybody else, as a user. I miss the look and feel of the templates available on the service, which can be customized with relatively little work. In terms of the beauty of one's site, if one overlooks the ugliness of the title on top, Xanga has no serious competitors that I know of, not even Blogger. But the price to be paid for that beauty is much too high, and so I settle for the humbler look offered by a more pleasant provider. If Xanga wants me, and so many other users, back, it can win us back by treating us better, but the company seems unwilling to do so, so for the forseeable future, Deadjournal is where this blog is going to be.

  http://joseph-dunphy.deadjournal.com/

  You know what? Deadjournal's been good to me. Even if Xanga does clean up its act, Stumbling in the Void will stay on Deadjournal as long as it can. But, if a miracle happens, I guess I'll find a new use for my Xanga blog. But miracles don't happen very often. That's why they seem so miraculous when they do. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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