Dan York

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today.

My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I haven’t really written there for most of 16 years… since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. “friends”) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after that… Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media company… and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, I’d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of “blogging” as a thing, and at the end of 2005 I’d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for “personal” blogging… up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web - and I’m grateful for the time that I was there!

Starting To Write On PacketPushers.net

Because clearly I don't have enough places to write, I've decided to start writing over on PacketPushers.net. You can find my first post on my profile page there.

I've long been a fan and listener to the excellent PacketPushers podcasts. If you are into networking of any type their shows are quite educational and enjoyable. (See the most recent shows in the right sidebar of packetpushers.net.)

Last year Russ White encouraged me to consider writing on Packet Pushers and connected me to the folks there to be set up as an author. They gave me an account... but then I've simply been way too busy with all the other writing I've been doing.

While at IETF 96 in Berlin last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with one of the two main hosts, Greg Ferro, and have a very wide-ranging conversation that I published as an episode in my The Dan York Report podcast. As part of that, I said to Greg that I'd see about starting to write there.

Greg also said they are perfectly fine with RE-publishing content that originates elsewhere... and this intrigued me. I'm already doing that with posting some of my articles to CircleID (although I'm also writing new articles there). I'm also experimenting with cross-posting to Medium now and then.

Packet Pushers has a strong community of people involved with networking. For a good number of the topics I write about it would be a logical place to also post my articles to encourage further discussion and get more engagement.

We'll see how that all goes. I greatly appreciate the Packet Pushers team for giving me the space to write there... and I would again encourage you to not only read the site, but also listen to the podcasts.

Looking To Display Recent Posts From Across All My Blogs

This site, DanYork.com, is meant to be my "home on the Internet".  It is the URL I give to people to find out more about me. It's part of my sign-off on my reports into the FIR podcast.  It's in my email signature.

But it doesn't really do a great job showing what I am writing right now.

The "blog" here is really a nowhere-else-to-post-it kind of blog.  If a topic doesn't fit into any of my other sites, it may wind up here.  But those posts are not exactly the ones that are "representative" of what I am writing and doing.

As you can see on the main page, I've recently put a "sticky" post up at the top pointing people to the 4 sites where I write the most. But this isn't a great solution... people still have to go to those sites to see what I'm writing.

In the longer term, what I really want to do is to turn this site into more of an aggregator of all the posts I've written across my various sites.  I haven't decided whether I'd do it simply chronologically, showing the last posts I've written (which you can actually get now via my FriendFeed firehose), or whether I would showcase the latest post in each of the main blogs.  I can show some pictures and such, too.

I've seen some nice WordPress themes that seem to do that... and as I bite the bullet in 2011 and make the big change I want to make away from TypePad over to WordPress, my goal is to implement this change as well.  I've already started launching new blogs like Code.DanYork.com over on a WordPress site... and ultimately I want to have my own "network" of sites very much like I have set up for Voxeo at blogs.voxeo.com.

Anyway, that's the plan... and at some point I may be out there asking some of you for your suggestions on WordPress themes, etc. In the end I would like to show people more of the content I create, rather than just saying that it is out there...