Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Weaning yourself off LJ: Why you might want to

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This is an introduction to a series of forthcoming articles. I figured that some people are going to want to know the background, and it might just help to have a quick roundup of reasons why you might want to do this.

First of all, let me just say that I’m addressing these articles to the section of LiveJournal users who refer to themselves (ourselves!) as “fandom”, and most specifically to fanfic authors and other producers of fanworks including art and videos. If you’re a LiveJournal user and not part of fandom, or fan but not a producer of fanworks, then you may well find this series useful, but you’ll have to adapt my suggestions a little.

As for “why”: well, the base reason is because LiveJournal is owned by a corporation, Six Apart, whose interests may not align with fandom’s, and who may choose to close down fannish LJ accounts without warning at any time. If you’re a fan who relies on LJ, and especially if you rely on them to host your fanworks, you could be left high and dry.

This is not idle speculation. Last week, in an event which is being called “Strikethrough ‘07″, LiveJournal suspended hundreds of accounts which had “pedophilia”, “incest”, or “rape” listed in their interests. While the ostensible reason for this was to shut down communities that were encouraging or organizing criminal activities, it also caught up a number of more legitimate journals. These included literary discussion groups related to Nabokov’s “Lolita”, the fictional journals of RPG villains, and some fan fiction journals including the popular Pornish Pixies.

Fandom, of course, went nuts. Whether you’re into Harry/Snape slash or not, it’s easy to see that this could be the thin edge of the wedge. The organisation that prompted the suspensions could easily have been targetting anything with sexual content, and if Six Apart decided that it wanted to clean up “unsavoury” communities before an IPO then the impact could have been a lot more serious.

Many fans have created backup journals at JournalFen or GreatestJournal, but those sites may be subject to the same kinds of legal pressures that LiveJournal is: if not now, then as they grow in the future.

One way to avoid having these problems is to host your own fanworks on your own site. Distributing fanworks more widely around the Internet will give organisations like those that targetted LiveJournal a more diffuse target to aim for. Even if they do target a small archive, any pressure they exert will be directly on the owner, who will be able to make their own choices about what to do rather than relying on the goodwill of a third party.

Traditionally, setting up a fannish archive has required you to know quite a bit about HTML and other web technologies, and to dedicate a fair chunk of time to the activity. I’m a professional at web development, and even I’ve found setting up fan websites to be a non-trivial task — even moreso when archiving the work of several authors. But it doesn’t have to be that hard! This is the 21st century, and we have the technology to do this easily now.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be posting a series of articles showing you how to set up a fannish archive on your own domain, using WordPress — the same software that runs this blog. Here’s a quick overview of what’s included:

• Setting up hosting and the basic software
• Multi-contributor archives
• Categories and tags
• Posting fanart and videos
• Multi-part works (chapters, WIPs, etc)
• Handling comments and avoiding spam
• Using themes to customise your site
• Handy plugins for various uses
• Feeding your work back to LJ via syndication or crossposting
• … and more

In terms of the level of technical skill involved, you’re not going to need any more than you use already for LJ: perhaps a smidgin of HTML for formatting your posts, a bit of CSS if you want to customise your presentation, but mostly just the ability to navigate a web-based admin interface.

So, stay tuned for the next part, which I’ll be posting shortly, and which will show you how to set up your archive and post your first story.

[...] Weaning yourself off LJ: Why you might want to [...]

[...] Before I begin, here are two links that I found helpful during this transition: Livejournal to Wordpress Weaning Yourself Off LJ [...]

[...] by the evil megacorporation Six Apart, it makes sense to have a contingency plan for escaping LJ.  Skud has produced a series on exactly that topic, with the final installment posted today.  Go check it out.  If you’re looking for a [...]

Wow, I feel like I might have written these articles myself, from reasons to wean oneself from LJ to good reasons for doing it.

Rock on.

Now if only my old LJ friends could do the same, even if they still posted to LJ. So many of them don’t read anything outside of their friends page, so even the conveniences of rss are irrelevant to them, even when I syndicate my rss on livejournal. I guess who you are is less important than how convenient you are.