This past weekend I deleted both my LiveJournal and MySpace accounts.

Around 2001 I began looking for an easier way to update my website more regularly. “Blogs” were not quite in vogue yet, so I ended up writing my own content management system (CMS). Compared to WordPress and other blogging programs that are available today, my slipshod pile of scripts was incredibly primitive, allowing me to append posts to a continually-growing flat file but not much else.

Soon I found LiveJournal, a free blog host that made writing and posting a breeze. I started using it for my daily updates but I soon ran into a problem, one I’ve been dealing with for years — and that was, I split up my audience. By moving to LiveJournal I gained a few readers, but some of the people who were used to checking for updates on my website never made the switch. My solution at the time, one I never truly got away from, was dual posting my updates in both locations.

Joining MySpace made things even better, and worse. Again I gained fans and readers and my audience expanded, but without the automation tools we have today I was copying each post and manually posting it in multiple locations. This issue was compounded by the fact that I was also updating a couple of video game blogs at the same time that used different formatting commands. This meant that I had to manually edit each post as well. What a mess!

I’ve tried to cut ties with these sites a few times before, but unfortunately automation tools made it easy enough just to leave them in place. WordPress (what robohara.com runs on today) automatically sends my updates to Twitter and LiveJournal; Twitter in turn updates Facebook, and MySpace slurps the updates down using RSS. For the past couple of years I’ve only had to post each update once, assuming all my scripts and plug-ins are working properly.

Even though all of this automation has made multi-posting simpler, one problem I’ve never been able to solve is by having content in five locations, I end up sprouting five different conversations. I tried solving this by turning off comments at some places (like MySpace) and adding links back to robohara.com in hopes that readers elsewhere would come back to the website to chat. It rarely happened.

Over the weekend I decided to pull in the reigns a bit. If you want to keep up with me, check out the right hand side of my webpage. There you’ll find e-mail updates, an RSS feed, and a link to my Twitter feed.

For anyone who was reading my posts over at MySpace or LiveJournal … welcome!