When I recently mentioned to someone that I'm approaching six years of blogging, the point was raised that my archives here really only go back to June 2004[1] and don't show my earlier history. Valid point. Those first four years I was blogging over at Advogato at http://www.advogato.org/person/dyork/. Then, as I mentioned in my first entry here at LJ almost two years ago, Advogato went down for about 5-6 weeks and, well, I needed somewhere to write. I also started using Semagic as an offline editor, which I continue to use daily and still find pretty much the best out there for a blog editor. (and yes, I've used ecto and it's pretty decent, too, but at this point I'm pretty hooked on Semagic and don't really have the time to learn something new)

I have given thought over the past couple of years to importing all the Advogato entries here. I guess what kept me back was that I kept viewing LJ as a "temporary" home while I figured out what blogging platform I really wanted to use. As I've written before, I have a number of perception and technical issues (although the latter are decreasing - if LJ would just give a way for non-LJ people to easily post with their own name/website instead of having to use 'Anonymous', my technical complaints would probably go away) with LiveJournal... but the other platforms have their own issues... so I'm increasingly thinking that I have to just suck it up and admit that I'm staying here for some period of time. And in doing so I should probably also think about pulling in the archives to have everything all in one easy place. Advogato nicely gives me all my text in one single big giant XML file, so getting it into a format that LJ (or anything else) could import is probably just a matter of writing a quick XSLT transform (says the guy who hasn't used or updated his XML processing toolchain for a year or two). We'll see.... (although somehow I don't see it happening anytime soon... too many other interesting things going on)

I note in looking at Advogato today that many of the same folks are still blogging there, along with many new names that I don't recognize... kudos to all the folks who continued writing there and for Raph Levien for continuing to keep the site going... Advogato's recentlog is still one of the great places to go to stay up on what many programmers are doing in the free software / open source / Linux world... some great people write there (although many people who started there have, like me, moved on to other platforms)... and it's a great place to learn of newer programmers and new projects entering the scene... do check it out if you haven't...

[1] I also note that I don't seem to have an easy link to archives here... something else I should probably change. It is not exactly intuitive that you have to click the name of the month and then move back to previous months. (And yes, there's an entry in January 2004 but that was just a test posting. I didn't really start using LJ until June 2004.)

Tags: advogato, blogging, livejournal, semagic