Mambo Taxi

I've given up on using LJ for my RSS feeds. I've got 88 of them, which means I sometimes don't see real people posts for pages and pages. I'm jumping to Google Reader. Google Reader will import "OPML" data, so that's how I wanted to do the transfer. This is a how-to.

(If you are hoping to read your LJ friends list directly from an RSS reader, you might instead try this exporter, which grabs the necessary data for friends- it doesn't include feeds and is beyond the scope of this how-to.)

The short version:

1) if you're handy with Perl, grab the code at the bottom of this entry, change the user name, and run the code.
1b) if you're not handy with Perl, give me a shout and I'll run it for you on my server. :)

2) Output is a list of RSS URLs. To translate these to OPML, feed them to this page. Copy and paste them into the big text box, then hit the "Create OPML" link. Seconds later, you will have an output file, which you should save to disk (the file name doesn't matter).

3) Optionally, open the file in a text editor and change the "title" parts from the URL into a sensible title for each feed. Yeah, I was too lazy to write my own OPML and fix that.

4) in Google Reader, the left-hand lower corner, choose "Manage Subscriptions". Choose "Import/Export". Browse and upload your OPML file.

Done!

So far, I like the google reader interface, and now I can actually pay attention to the real people on my list who do still post. (I appreciate y'all! I did this for yoooou!)

---
Don't bother reading the rest unless you want technical details; mostly here for google searching. Let me know if this helped anybody!

The code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $base_url = "http://da-lj.livejournal.com/profile";

my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new ( autocheck => 1 );

$m->get( $base_url );

my $profile_html = $m->content;
my @feed_lines = ($profile_html =~ /watchingfeeds_body.*/g);
my @feed_urls = ($feed_lines[0] =~ /href='(.*?)'/g);

foreach my $lj_url (@feed_urls) {
    $m->get( $lj_url );
    print $m->find_link( text => 'XML' )->url() . "\n";
}

And that's it. I'm using WWW::Mechanize, which is the bee's knees if you have to do screen-scraping in Perl.

I started off with a manual grab of my "watching" page, a word-processor search-and-replace, and was about to run a batch of 'wget's to grab the lj-feed pages when I realized it would be quicker in perl.

The biggest drawback to this method is the cost of installing WWW::Mechanize in the first place. CPAN makes it easy(ish) but it has a tonne of dependencies. ...I guess it's just one step if you're on a reasonably recent Debian/Ubuntu.

Anyhow.

I knocked 11 things off my to-do list today. Tracks tells me I did 25 in the last 24 hours.

Now I have *only one* that's overdue by more than a week, and it was due back in July.

All of these due-dates are self-imposed. Still, the two stalest items were a huge relief to finally do. (One was start a google group to restart a conversation about FGC and Queer Quakers, which I had promised to do in July; this is a huge relief to get underway again. The other was to remind a local service agency I have a pile of computer equipment I'd like to donate.)

In the last 24 hours I added something like 40 new items, though 1/3 of these were music I want to buy, reminders of things I'm waiting on, and a few "someday" items. And some aren't actionable yet, but I still wanted to note them.

This afternoon I went back through my last four months of daily journal, and turned as many of those into action-items as felt necessary. Before today, I hadn't twigged to the fact that I really should be going through that every week or so, according to the GTD model. And yes, it was freeing, to get them into one master-list.

I think there might be (at least) two kinds of successfully organized people: one sort who is reassured to have everything in their brain, and wouldn't want to trust any sort of external system; and the other who in the end is reassured to have it all down in front of them.

The second variety is the kind I am, and it's one reason why GTD clicks with me.

This feels fairly over-sharing, which is why I'm not actually talking more about what's on the lists (though I'm probably happy to share if you have questions).

I seem to have 23 LJ posts in the queue. I wonder how many of them will ever finish baking.

I had an odd thought recently; how people my age often rely on their parents and other older relatives to not be net-savvey. What would happen if that crazy aunt of yours [1] started commenting in your LJ?

Teens today: how do they feel about their parents being internet savvey? I expect they have much less of the luxury of assumed anonymity. And it works both ways- how many teens have googled their families? Old usenet posts? Growing up with google is an odd thing. Imagine finding your 50-year-old uncle's angst-ridden poetry from when he was a teenager... (I mean, that's always happened, especially in close families or in smaller towns when everyone was in everyone else's business... but the potential seems much greater now). Weirdness.

At the same time, what about the relatives you get along with, but you're just not friends? The internet is a great leveler; after all. What about relatives who would probably be interested in your life to the extent you shared it with them; but there's this barrier. Partly due to the age difference; partly family dynamics, partly any number of other things.

On the positive side, I wonder how many people became better friends with family members via the internet. It's so great at joining people who are looking for friends/relationships/whatever. I wonder if it could make families have better connections too. Or it could be intensely awkward.

I'm also thinking about the families where there are fewer of the standard barriers; parents socializing with their kids at parties, talking about anything they'd talk about with friends... How that feels... inspiring, yet odd to me. I've got this strong default-assumption that people will want their privacy; it makes me less open than I might otherwise be. How do these families negotiate what feels appropriate or inappropriate to talk about? I suppose the same way any friends do..

Anyway, a few thoughts on this lazy Saturday afternoon. Whoop, evening.

[1] because everyone has a crazy aunt. Or uncle. Ask melted_snowball about the story; it's a really good one. :)

Also: unpacking: I found an unlabeled DVD in my bags from NYC and it took me a few minutes to realize it was made by my uncle Leon; it's an hour of my grandmother and her three elder sisters talking with each other about the old days. It's a real treasure, and I'm very happy he transferred the interview from video. (and it's really fun to watch my grandmother interact with her sisters as siblings; they bickered like teenagers, even though they were all well over 85 years old. :)

Life is Change, and woe to those who can't deal with that.

I ran across this philosophy stated in stronger terms, that God is Change, but I won't go so far as to suggest that right now. Maybe later when I'm in an Octavia Butler mood. That post will probably have a lot to do with Internal versus External Locus of Control. But this entry is instead about obsolescence.

Three signs of change that prolly ought to piss me off but don't this morning, in order of increasing amusement value:

On a personal level, the Internet just got more complicated for both me and my brother Zack. Our mother started reading my journal. Long story short, I talked with her and we worked out that it was awkward enough that I didn't want her reading it, but I'd email her more instead. Then, she found cyanpill my brother and the results weren't pretty. Objectively, I think, there are some mom-alarm-worthy moments in his journal, but hell, the guy's 22, of course there will be (if they're going to be posted in a public journal). So he's gone friends-only posts. Mom hasn't told him she won't read his. So it's rather messy. It's leading to all kinds of interesting talks in my family at least, but it's definitely an off-kilter way to have them. So far, neither of us in my household are switching to friends-only posts, but I now have reason to consider it.

On a more interpersonal level, in the last 12 hours, my personal email address got 111 spam messages that got through spamassassin (version 2.64). I'm a patient guy, but ~175 a day aren't worth wading through. I considered killing the address completely, but I like the domain, and I was there first. So I'm going to lower my spam threshold and consider killing the address completely if that and similar fixes don't work. It's surprising to me, since taking a "regular job", the number of previously unquestionable assumptions I can now question, since I don't have to put so much work energy into finding and keeping clients myself. (Can I move my server in-house and save $100US/month? Do I need to answer email at so many addresses? Do I need a cell-phone? Do I need a PO box in Ithaca for business mail? and so on.) Every change I've made has felt freeing, and simplification is good.

On a not-at-all connected to me level, seems to me that Microsoft's security model has got to be in trouble. It appears that any windows program that uses MSHTML is an attack vector, according to those who report such things.
So, if you run Windows (up through XP/Server 2003 including SP 2) better patch or unplug from the network. I think I no longer trust any argument that security works better in a closed company than in an open-source project. How many thousands of engineers, how many levels of security audits did their latest OSes go through? This looks like a pretty wide hole, at least to a relatively naive non-windows-programmer like me.

... and indeed, it is just as easy to post using centericq. It even stores my outgoing entry when I quit the program. Lots of behaviours follow the principle-of-least surprise, and I really like the simple interface.

So, then, why did I bother changing the default background on my lj page, much as, why am I writing a *second* entry?

Perhaps the answer is a contradiction of my first answer- I might have bugger all to write, after all.

It was distinctly gratifying to discover that three of the five people I put onto my friends-list immediately put me on theirs. The other two can be excused; one had never met me (I've only known of him through my partner, d, though I'm sure I'd like him if we ever meet). And the other person is, I understand, pretty darn busy.

So, you'll excuse me while I go and fill in some more of my profile, and go see if I can find other friends of mine around lj.