Aldeboran is gone. Disappeared into the black hole of blogs, Word Press. I really liked Aldeboran.
This trend, I assume from all the changes that Google is making to all its products, is something I have resisted and warned others about. By being the 'beta' testers for every new scheme they cook up we subject ourselves to losing what we have worked for. G+ has done more damage this year to the OSR community than all possible c&ds and lawsuits combined, deleting blogs or their content whenever someone tried to go back to a previous setting.
FAIR WARNING: ONCE YOU USE A NEW FEATURE FROM GOOGLE YOU CAN RARELY UNDO IT.
Now , there are worse things than Word Press, Live Journal comes to mind as the biggest piece of crap I have ever seen (crashed every browser on 5 different computers the other day due to some mutant script running) but that doesn't excuse Word Press. It is like when I signed up for MySpace. My only real experience with 'social networking' came to an end a week after signing up and being blitzkrieged by every creature who could figure out how to log in and spam the whole system.
The final straw, and I do not exaggerate, was the Myspace page that I went to that was 3 screens wide, had so much orange and lime green colors that it burnt holes in the back of my skull as I was overtaken by a seizure from the flashing and whizzing gizmos and rainbows and 5, count them 5, music players all set to start at the same time at max volume.
I've never returned and I never will.
The Eternal Keep was an accident. I started the blog because the title was available and because I hated Google's reader interface so bad that I toyed around with EK and found the blog widget could hold a substantial amount of titles.
And so it began. A pure accident. One of the most successful things I have done in the blog community became a hit with others I can only assume because it appealed to readers for the same reasons as me.
And it SCALED.
Due to a number of issues that I will not bore you with I have to be able to hold down Ctrl and use scroll on the mouse to be able to read a page most of the time. Blogger was great for this because it scaled for the most part very nicely.
Word Press, and please excuse my language, doesn't scale worth a SHIT. It makes an unreadable mess of everything and I want a page that has the full post, not just another snippet of lead in that I already got at the Eternal Keep. I also have the most amount of problems with their feeds and being emailed by the authors of WP blogs that something is not right at EK on almost a daily basis.
I am not a facist. I will not dictate where a person may spend their creative energies nor find their happiness. I also will not deal with Word Press any longer because at the end of the day the Eternal Keep is still where I get my news from and if I can't read it it is just taking up the limited space that I have available to list blogs on EK.
If there are WP blogs that are not causing a problem they will remain, but I will no longer spend half a day trying to figure out why WP does what it does. There are no ads on the site and I don't get paid to maintain it. Thus it needs to be a positive and not a negative thing in the daily routine.
I'm not trying to piss anyone off or chase them away. I am simply making a decision on what I am willing to tolerate from blogging software the same as others.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and please continue to enjoy the Eternal Keep as we go through this period of change. I have over 1,000 blogs back listed to start adding soon.
