Back in September, I issued a warning about my email address. If you have me as enigma@ in your address book, you should change that to brian@. As of today, I’m officially shutting down the enigma@ address. (Not that I’ve looked at it recently, anyway–it’s pretty much just spam at this point.)

Dear LiveJournal peeps,
There are many of you (I’ve specifically run into this with sakkaranoush and torgo_x) who have journals that don’t allow OpenID people to leave comments. You’ve friended me and so I can see protected entries, but I’m unable to write a comment. Looking through the FAQ, I see this info:

Currently on LiveJournal, OpenID comments count as anonymous comments for the purpose of allowing comments and as comments from registered users for the purposes of screening comments. To allow OpenID comments, a user must also set his or her account to allow anonymous comments. There is no way to allow a specific OpenID account to comment without enabling anonymous commenting.

It looks like you need to go to your “Comment Settings” and then “Enable commenting from Everybody.” Optionally, you can enable screening. Or you can do nothing at all and your journal remains read-only for me.

Well, I think I’m taking a huge step that I’ve been contemplating for a long time and finally decided to jump into. Those of you on LiveJournal might notice a new friend request later this weekend. That request will not be from a regular user, but one with a weird little orange “I” next to the name: The name associated with the account is “netninja.com.” This is me taking another step away from LiveJournal. Lots of people complained the last few time LJ f’ed up: when they suspended accounts based on nebulous concepts of “adult” content, when they silently dropped the free-non-ad-supported account level. Lots of people said “I’m closing my account.” I am not aware of anyone that did. There was that laughable “strike” that was about as effective as everyone not buying gas on a particular day, but that was it. I have always thought of myself as an early adopter, so consider this to be me trailblazing a path away from LJ that others can later follow. It’s not a cold-turkey “I quit,” but is a big step away. I joined LiveJournal in 2001. It was pretty cutting-edge back then. The developers had cool ideas and implemented them. Seven years later, LJ just feels stagnant. Decisions are made by an unseen committee inside of a Russian corporation. New and cutting-edge ideas don’t seem to be surfacing. Lots of new themes are available and there are increasingly more ways for someone else to monetize my content, but that’s about all I see. As a result, I’m taking yet another step away from LiveJournal. The first step was to set up my own blog and configure it to cross-post to LJ. This step involves OpenID and dropping that cross-posting.

This OpenID account does not mean that I will stop participating in the LiveJournal community. I can’t write journal posts with OpenID, but in all other regards it acts as a regular free account. I can be friended and unfriended. I can read protected posts. I can write comments. I can even have a handful of user icons. I’m not leaving LiveJournal–I’m just changing how I access it.

LiveJournal users will also notice that my cross-posting to http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/ will cease to function in a few days. While the syndication never actually broke and the code behind it was quite solid, the solution has always seemed a little too “string and sealing wax” to me. The established norm for that sort of cross-posting has always been RSS. You’ll always be able to read entries directly at Netninja, you’ll always be able to subscribe to the RSS, and because an RSS feed is available, you can see those entries directly in LJ by adding brianenigma_rss as a friend.

In Summary

* The BrianEnigma account is being deprecated.
* My new LiveJournal login will be netninja.com. I’ll be reading and commenting.
* My posts will be available on LiveJournal at brianenigma_rss

A few interesting Twitter updates from the past month or two…

* Someone needs to invent a Capri-Sun style single-serving wine pouch.
* Just got RickRolled by a restaurant Muzak system.
* I love how marketing departments say “it tastes earthy” when they mean “it tastes like dirt.”
* This town needs an automat.

---

<rant>
I’ve ranted and raved in comments before about people who use the automatic daily-Twitter-digest-to-blog-post services, but I am not sure that I made an actual blog post about it yet. So here goes. This is specifically in reference to a post Addlepated made today, but in general applies to anyone and everyone.

People of the blogosphere: if you are blindly posting all of your tweets to your blog, please stop. The same goes for your Delicious links.

While everyone calls Twitter “microblogging,” it really ends up being a bunch of ephemeral messages, announcements, and conversations. It is often used more like instant messaging than blogging, the content of which doesn’t really jive with being an automated digest to cross-post to a blog. I don’t cross-post every tweet for much the same reason I don’t cross-post IM or IRC logs. Or in this context, it would not even be the full log, just my half of the conversation. “@username blah blah blah” really doesn’t make sense without the preceding or following tweets.

Most of the people I follow in the blogoverse I also follow on Twitter (and if I don’t, it’s because I do not know you use it), so digest blog posts end up being a double-helping of information.

I am not suggesting keeping every last bit of Twitter-related goodness off of blog posts. Hand-picked conversations, in moderation, are wonderful! See my Twitter excerpts, above. Posting tweets is especially nice when they’re of general interest with a little bit of commentary or banter, giving context. Similarly, hand-picked snippets of IM or IRC conversation are great, too. It’s just the firehose of automated updates that ends up being annoying.

At the very least, if you continue to insist on including Twitter posts in the blog, please consider doing what Josh did–leaving those particular posts out of the Wordpress RSS feed–or what Feedle did–no specific post/method to point to, but he blogs on LiveJournal and has them behind an lj-cut. I hate to be threatening, but I’ve already dropped some people from my reading list (both RSS and the LiveJournal default friends view) because of this.

So please, please, please, if you are considering cross-posting tweets to your blog, please don’t do so. Let Twitter do what it’s good at and let your blog do what it’s good at. Let them cross over only when it makes sense to do so.
</rant>

I thought I had accidentally blocked myself from posting on my very own site, mainly because I had recently done some wmapping of a corporate site (hi, Phaedra!) and thought I got my IP on a blacklist because of it. The Bad-Behavior plugin I use on this Wordpress installation does a great job at blocking spammers, but was also blocking me! I added my IP to the whitelist and promptly forgot until this morning when Substitute pointed to a new release of Bad-Behavior. I guess one of the sites BB checks was returning a constant false-positive, so *everyone* running it was getting locked out of posting. I just upgraded and removed myself from the whitelist, so assuming this posts correctly, then all has been fixed.

So if anyone was unable to comment in the last few days because Netninja thought you were a spammer, that’s why.

This tests Netninja -> LiveJournal+Facebook+MySpace

I have no idea how this is supposed to work. I guess I don’t get to pick the individual video, just a category like “Technology.” So, here goes…

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

…and it seems it does not (yet?) work…

I just started using MarsEdit for writing posts. I tried it when I first set up the blog at the new address, but did not stick with it. I vaguely remember something slightly broken, but that may have been my inexperience with WordPress at the time. Anyway, there is a new version, which is what prompted me to try.

At first, the new version of MarsEdit did not work at all. It turned out (after some Googling) that this is because Dreamhost upgraded to a recent version of PHP, which has a known bug that breaks WordPress’s xmlrpc interface. The fix is simple and now all is well. This will be my first post with the new MarsEdit. Hopefully, the formatting turns out okay, giving me actual links instead of raw HTML codes.

In related news (well, semi-related–they both used to be owned by the same company, right?), a v3.0 release of NetNewsWire, the OS X RSS reader, is now available. It looks pretty slick, although I have yet to see any revolutionary changes from the previous 2.x version I was using.

Today we watched An Inconvenient Truth for the first time. I actually bought the used DVD from Netflix last month for a few bucks, but just now got around to watching it. We are now, officially, on 100% renewable power. I signed us up for the PGE Renewable Future plan. This means our power bills will be slightly more, as our power will be coming from the semi-local Klondike II wind farm, but our power usage will be entirely from renewable resources. This also means that our power rate will be fixed until 2012. In theory, as fossil fuels become more scarce and prices rise for everyone else, ours will stay fixed. In practice, I guess we will see how that works out.

In related news, my web host (Dreamhost) is now carbon-neutral:

We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something….

It only took us three days to go from “Hey let’s do this” status to “Hey it’s done!” status. Three days and several thousand dollars, but that’s another story. You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to appreciate the value of renewable energy and you don’t have to charge a premium for your services to afford it, either.

More information is available at their blog post on the matter.

This is a test post after dropping all existing netninja.com content and merging the netninja.org and netninja.com content into the same site.  They now mirror each other (although the .com is still the preferred access domain.)  At some point in the future, I expect web filters to drop netninja.com from their list of evil sites.  I have no idea when this will be or if there is a way to expedite the process.