It is done.  I have pushed through my 900 post Livejournal archive for anything worth keeping, exported it to Lameazoid or Joshmiller.net and deleted the temporary WordPress I was using as a staging area.  I made an export archive I called "Livejournal cruft" and will bury it somewhere in my personal archive at home.

Part of this also involved actively deleting the content from Livejournal itself.  This means there is only one master copy now, on the main blogs.

I am so glad I finally did this too.  I found a handful of reviews I had been missing for Lameazoid.  Nothing Major, some mini toy and movie reviews.  More importantly were a lot of more sentimental posts regarding my family, my wedding, when I proposed, when relatives or pets passed away, etc.  Important meaningful stuff, to me anyway.  It really was nice to reread some of it and it really reinforces why I blog in the first place, at least for my personal blog.

The real question here, I suppose, is the why.  I have switched platforms and hosts repeatedly over the years.  Now I just pay for it.  I will probably never move platforms or hosts again in any significant way.  As popular as Facebook may get, I have always and probably will always prefer controlling my own content.  I certainly don’t plan to fragment the way I have in the past.  A lot of it is about control, control of the data.  Sitting on Livejournal, a service that I am pretty sure isn’t doing too hot, it is just waiting to be destroyed or misused.  Look at what happened to Geocities.  All those sites are gone now.  Is the internet worse off?  Maybe, maybe not, but you can bet a lot of content creators were irritated.

Now, I have it all, and I have the master, not a copy.  The garbage export will just rot in a file archive,  but the meat I have skimmed, roughly, 400 posts mostly in the 2004-2007 range, probably evenly distributed between the two blogs, are now part of the whole.  I previously pooled a lot of my old stuff, Everyman Tech, Broadcast Quality, IO, OSAF VOX, Pen to Paper, Writer’s Block, all into JoshMiller.net/blog.  Now I have Livejournal too, and it was the largest straggler.

It is also on ‘my’ hosting.  Even if Godaddy goes belly up, restoring it from a backup is simple and easy.  No threat of Livejournal going under.

What is next?  For Lameazoid, the Toys category needs a serious housecleaning.  On JoshMiller, the Personal Life one does as well, especially now.  For example, I will probably make a Work category, because I have a lot of old posts related to working, for example.

I also want to organize my offline files better now as well.  Part of this motivation, I had a drive crash a few years ago and it took a very large chunk of my personal files with it.  Knowing who I am and how I operate, I just KNOW most of it is backed up somewhere.  I want to also push more of that online, as a backup.  We will call it Legacy Content.

I hope to find my old Original Chaos Xone posts and start adding backdated entries to Lameazoid.  It would be pretty awesome to actually have blog entries back to 1998 when I first started.  Even if it is like 5 or 6 a year, I would love that a lot.

Also on my overall organizational strategy, I want to type up and digitize a lot of my old hand written content.  I sort of started this a while ago, it’s just, kind of slow and tedious.  I have a lot of old stories written in notebooks.  Also a lot of old journal style entries.  I suppose the ultimate goal is to make my entire history of creative ideas a massive searchable ball of content.

Anyway, I also plan to sift a lot of my artwork either to Deviant Art or a local hosted gallery.  So look for that too.

Here are a few highlights…

Disk Space… – I have noticed, that I have made a post about the increasing capacity of hard drives almost once a year.  It’s kind of funny.

The Illusion of Security – A conspiracy post before I had a short sting with conspiracy as a hobby.

Job Interview – I get a job working in Television Engineering.  This essentially becomes the driving force of my career.

I like My sugar with Coffee and Cream – I guess my recent indulgence in Coffee wasn’t really the first time.

I Feel Better Now – I proposed to my uh… wife, I guess, though she wasn’t my wife then, so do I still call her my wife?  My Tina?

Anyway, i could go on, but you get the idea.  I also have finally collected most of the I am… Essays I write occasionally detailing various aspects of my life and personality.  It’s a series I stared ages ago and one of the few, if not the only continuous series of blog posts I’ve ever done and stuck with.