As I've come back to LiveJournal, I've spent a bit of time rummaging around to try and find out what's changed. Given that I've been gone for quite a few years, startling little has changed about the site. I see few new innovations and on the whole the entire site could have been frozen in amber and preserved. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise really. I mean, lets face it, livejournal's heyday has come and gone. It was surpassed and replaced with myspace many years ago, which itself perished to the onslaught of facebook, who in turn has fallen to the wayside due to sallies from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and God only knows what the kids are dicking around with nowadays. Tinder? Grinder? Snapchat? It may not cost much to keep an old dinosaur like LJ running, but it also means that there can't be much revenue flowing in these days. Certainly not enough to fun improvements and added functionality.

One of the sad changes I discovered is that Voiceposting was given the axe at the start of this year. A pity because that's one feature that I had actually planned to take advantage of again. It used to allow you to call a phone number and record a voice message which would be posted as well as transcribed to your journal. Pretty spiffy really, and I used to use it all the time during conventions where I might not have time or the motivation to tediously tap out an entry. I guess I could use voice recording software on my phone and then upload audio files directly to my journal, but it just wouldn't be the same somehow.

It's nice to see that the whole userpics thing is still around. I actually felt a burst of affection and happy nostalgia when I looked at my collection of userpics. It's the one thing I think facebook should have adopted. I know you can change your profile picture on the site but it's a tedious and downright obnoxious process, especially if you wanted to regularly swap the images. Livejournal allows you to pre-set a bunch of them and then select whichever you want to use whenever you post an entry. I had made a good chunk of them myself back in the day and it's like seeing old friends you had almost forgotten. I think I'm going to do my best to set up shop again, at least for the time being. The downside of LJ is that it always made me feel lonely in the end. Writing blogs as opposed to status updates requires that you actually spend some time thinking about what you're going to say and it always felt like I was throwing words into the void. I seriously doubt that's going to change since there have never been many people who cared about my ramblings but it might be good for me to actually jumpstart my brain again.