More on moving journals

(writing this mostly because writing it down makes me more likely to follow through)

Part of the reason it's been so difficult to leave LiveJournal is that I've been treating LiveJournal as my portal to the web. My tech saavy friends have laughed at me for this, because there are many better things out there than LJ, but I loved my little LJ community and spent so much time there that it made sense for me to have everything in one place.

But. It's really past time that I move beyond this. So here's what I'm doing:

* I've been using LJ as a feed reader (watching henryjenkins, janeespenson, theonionfeed, cuteoverload, wilwheaton, etc). I've switched to Google Reader, which is far superior--you can sort everything into categories, mark stuff as read, and because it's so much more organized and efficient, I can actually watch far more feeds this way. (I've got a whole Doctor Who category now! Yay!) There are plenty of other feed readers out there, but I went with Google for simplicity.

* I've been using LJ's memories function to store bookmarks. This has the obvious flaw that it limits my bookmarks to LJ-only links. Now I've got a del.icio.us account and dammit, I'm going to make myself use it.

* Calendar. I've been using LJ as a calendar in the completely inane sense of having a locked entry that I update with stuff I need to remember to do. So uh, Google Calendar looks nice.

* I've been using LJ's scrapbook to store photos. In the future I will use Flickr.

Thus LJ (and now IJ) becomes a site I check only for the stuff it's good at, namely that my friends and fannish communities are there. But this way it's less important to my overall experience of the web, and this makes it less stressful/easier for me to move when/if LJ/IJ fucks up (again).

[Cross-posted to InsaneJournal]