cairistiona's place

Steak-n-Shake sign on Route 66 in Springfield. pic.twitter.com/v3FRoiFmGw

— cairistiona (@cairistiona7) June 30, 2014

Hey, it works! Very cool! Now if they can just allow tumblr embed codes, life would really get fun.

(That's a photo I took of the old-school Steak-n-Shake restaurant sign along Route 66 in downtown Springfield, Missouri. Most of the Steak-n-Shakes have long since been updated, but because that restaurant is on an historic by-way, they've kept it in the original style, including the signage.)

Well, folks, LJ is screwing us again, this time apparently foisting a new friends page layout on us whether we want it or not. *points to ugly blue toggle bar above that leads to an even uglier friends page format*  From what I gather, this is in beta testing mode right now but will probably become permanent after the beta is done.  There are hundreds and hundreds of complaints about it, ones that will no doubt be ignored like all the other complaints that LJ has received over previous unwanted "upgrades".

For me... this may be the last straw that forces me over to Dreamwidth. I tried LJ's new friends "system page", as they're calling it, and I don't like it at all. It's very white, very cluttered, very glaring, and at least for me, very boring because it's not in "my" style. It looks too much like the mobile version of LJ, which, when viewed via a mobile device, is okay, as you don't want a lot of clutter on your phone. But when I'm on my PC, I want to see "my" journal in its full glory. I worked hard to create the look of my journal, and since my friends page is where I spend most of my time, not having the layout in my own style is problematic, not least of which because it's so glaringly white (even though it's supposed to be light grey). 

I've been futzing around with my Dreamwidth journal, figuring out how to get a similar header to this journal, and last night I finally figured out a rough CSS (oh how I wish I could have just copied the custom CSS I have for this LJ but coding is never easy, is it). So I have a lovely header over there (one that I like better than this one, actually, though it still needs some tweaking), even though I still want to fiddle with the colors of text and background, yada yada.  But... the thing is, even if I do all this, none of my friends post over there. You're all posting here at LJ, so if I move... will anyone move with me?  My reading page is very lonely over there!  I can and will cross-post to LJ, but really do worry about keeping up with friends' posts here.  Infinite scrolling sounds fun, and when I'm doing a google search, it's handy, but trying to find older posts that I've missed is extremely difficult with infinite scrolling.  Not only does it take forever, but it eventually clogs up the browser and everything locks up. I'm sure I'll miss posts whereas right now, I don't.  I just don't see anything good coming of this.

Gah!!! *keyboard slam*  Why, LJ??  Why?  *sigh*

I really, really hope we can opt out of the new version of the friends page, though I have my doubts. The last time they made changes, there was a sh*tstorm of protests that they gleefully ignored. I'm also hearing rumblings of LJ planning to cancel paid accounts next spring. What that means, no one knows, and they're apparently not saying until closer to the time, if you can believe the comments by people who claim to know Russian and have read the posts.  Given LJ management's growing reputation as an obstinate, arrogant entity, I really have no reason not to believe those rumors. It just seems like the Russian PTB in charge of LJ want it to be a weak, late-to-the-party imitator of tumblr, twitter and Facebook.  I have a twitter account, I don't care for tumblr, and Facebook is the spawn of Sauron that I only am on to keep track of my daughter's behavior online.

I won't be changing anything just yet.  I'll have to transfer all my Scrapbook photos to my photobucket, save all my icons, and of course look into getting a paid account at Dreamwidth, who thankfully *are* amenable to user input, extremely so from what I've seen.  But I think I'm seeing the writing on the wall (in Cyrillic, no less) and I'm sensing the time is nigh to part ways with LJ except for cross-posting. I'm getting tired of contributing monetarily to a company that could care less about my needs and desires.

Thoughts?

Hee hee... change of pace!  For Aragorn-a-day today, I thought I'd post one of rs9's lovely illustrations!

~~~~

Also:  for users of Scrapbook, there's information about LJ's upcoming changes to the Scrapbook feature here.  It's a user-translated post of the original Russian post, not an "official" one, which is apparently coming eventually (LJ really could stand to improve their communication with users.  Ahem. Not going there... not going there...not going there... *squashes rant*)

I use Photobucket exclusively now, so I don't think this will affect how I post photos (unless they no longer allow HTML links to Photobucket, which *would* affect me, but I've heard nothing that would hint at that).  From what I understand, once they've implemented whatever this new version is, the old version won't be available, but since they're also migrating everyone's photos and redirecting old URLs to the new ones,  I don't see how that's a problem unless the file/organization gets messed up or there's some sort of massive data loss when they migrate the photos.  Backing up your photos might be a good idea, just in case.

No date given for when this goes into affect, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up, so if you see something whackadoodle about the insert-photo button, you'll k now what's going on.

In case you haven't seen this:

Originally posted by markf at CSRF/Phishing attack