Dry Ice Factory

Prachi Gupta is incredulous that anybody as famous as George RailRoad Martin is still using LiveJournal, "the outdated blogging platform most often associated with teens from 2004." And Martin isn't the only one stuck in the past!

It just goes to show how much I've changed over the years that I'm now okay with being in touch with my inner teen. It wasn't always so.

I've just requested that my LJ username be changed from fringefaan to randy_byers. All my Friends links should be automatically updated, from what they say. Do not be alarmed. I gotta be me. I don't know how long it will take for the change to be effected.

Yesterday I went back through my 2010 posts on film -- and I didn't make it all the way, because I wrote a lot about film in 2010. I liked a fair number of my more ambitious posts, and it got me thinking -- again -- about trying to make my film writing more accessible. I block search engines on my LiveJournal just to make it slightly harder for the uninitiated to find the personal writing here. Mostly I'm not eager for my family to find this. I prefer to interact with them on Facebook.

So how do I make my film writing discoverable by search engines but not my other LJ writing? I could start a separate LJ dedicated to film writing (and maybe other non-personal writing too). I could Friends-lock all my personal writing on this journal and unblock the journal as a whole from search engines. One problem I have with the latter solution is the amount of work it would take to go through my whole journal Friends-locking personal posts. The problem I have with the former solution is the amount of work it would take to transfer my past film writing to a new location. On the other hand, I could just start a film journal from scratch and forget all my fucking-brilliant past work. But then I also worry that if I started writing about film for an anonymous (i.e., open) audience, I would start over-thinking it. As I am probably over-thinking this whole issue right here, right now.

And so once more inertia wraps me in its ample arms.

I suppose another option would be to Friends-lock all my past posts in this journal (there's a way to do it globally, isn't there?), unblock the search engines, and then write unlocked posts going forward that I don't mind being searchable. I could unlock past posts on film as I had the time and interest in doing so. Hm.

So I've finally discovered the Stats/My Guests page for LiveJournal (accessible via the Profile menu), and I'm puzzling over the results. One thing I don't understand is the Journal stats versus the Entries stats. For example, if I look at the Journal stats for yesterday, it says 100 unique people looked at my pages or pages I commented on in other people's LJs. It says that of those, 7 looked at my journal directly (I think). Now, if I look at the Entries stats for my post from yesterday about The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, it says that 63 people saw it in some form or another but only 2 people looked at it directly. I'm assuming that means only 2 people looked at the comments, probably the two people who made comments.

So I'm a little confused about how to interpret the results. I guess it means that 100 people looked at pages that included *something* I wrote (whether an entry or a comment), but only 63 people looked at pages that included that specific entry. Of the 100 people who looked at pages including something I wrote, 7 clicked through to one of my entries, probably to look at (and/or make) comments.

It's actually been interesting to look at the stats, even though at first I found them kind of depressing because I was only looking at the number of people who visited my journal directly. The more I ponder them, however, the more I get a sense of how people read LiveJournal: mostly via Friends Pages, which is how I do it too, only clicking through if I want to read or make a comment. Has anybody studied their stats in more detail?

Does anybody else have a problem with disappearing userpics? I've had two vanish in the past week. I yam baffled.