I am now officially leaving the livejournal fold. My blog will still be available at gthing.net, but I have upgraded to wordpress on my own server. Yes, this is an upgrade. All my old posts have been transferred over to the new blog.

For those of you who visit through www.gthing.net, you'll simply notice the shiny new theme. If you don't see it yet, you will soon. It may take a while (a few hours from when I posted this) before you can see the new site...

For those of you who read through livejournal, if you would still like to see me on your friends page, you will be able to. But for it to work, I need someone with a paid LJ account (mine expired) to go here, scroll to the bottom of the page, paste in http://gthing.net/feed/rss/ and create a feed. Give it an awesome name like "gthing" or "gthing.net." Once someone does that, then everyone will be able to add that feed to their freind's page.

Changes:

• Scrapped the "www" - now you can just go to gthing.net
• Wordpress 2.0.1 powered - which means it's more awesome
• New, cleaner theme
• 50% more awesome

All new posts will be cross posted to my livejournal for about a week.
If you're interested in the reasons why I changed, read on.

Livejournal is like the sandbox of the Internet. It's a nice place to play, but doesn't offer very many awesome features that I've really been missing. For example, all javascript, flash, embeds, etc. are parsed out - meaning you can't post videos or have anything that resmbles an advanced feature. Text, images, and links only. With wordpress I can do whatever I want.

If you pay for livejournal, which I did for the past year, you get a few more features - but it's still way crappy. And you still don't have control over posting embeds and javascript.

Livejournal also has some problems dealing with domains. My domain gthing.net forwards to my livejournal account (or at least it used to). This means my blog can be accessed from gthing.livejournal.com, www.livejournal.com/users/gthing, and gthing.net. When people link to me it is at gthing.livejournal.com usually. So I am basically giving livejournal all the value that my gthing.net domain should be getting.

Livejournal Syndication sucks. I can't even get an RSS feed for my friends page, which is a huge missing feature. I will probably link to it from here though.

Politics and Liability. As long as someone else is hosting my blog, they have the right of control over what I say. Livejournal isn't too insane, but they have deactivated accounts before for questionable content. Not planning on posting anythign questionable, I just want whats mine to be mine.

That's about it.