Once I ran a blog on Livejournal, almost a decade ago. Then I forgot about it. Then Livejournal got bought by a Russian company, but the servers stayed in the West. Then, at some unspecified point in 2016, the servers moved to Russia before anyone noticed.

Why is this important? Well, there’s obviously a bit of a problem having your data on servers in a country known to have a record of cyber warfare. There is also a more personal reason. In 2014, Russia passed a law requiring bloggers with an audience of over 3000 to register with a government media regulator. This applies to Livejournal now that it is hosted on Russian servers. So it also applied to my blog.

Furthermore, and even more personally, in 2013, Russia passed a law against what it called the distribution of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” and “distorted ideas about the equal social value of traditional and non-traditional sexual relationships”.

This also applied to my blog, as some of the content is unashamedly queer. In fact, it was the first blog on which I was unashamedly queer and public about it on the Internet. (Not that there’s anything to be ashamed about.)

2006- when I first posted on LiveJournal- may be less than 20 years ago, but it was a different planet. The concept of civil partnerships for people like me, and my future husband, had been passed into law just a couple of years previously. (Note- not marriage, but civil partnerships.) I remember being enthusiastic about getting all civil partnershipped up, only for my future husband to caution me: if a government comes in who are not friendly towards us, they will have a list of names.

It was also just a few years after a bitter public debate in my native Scotland about the removal of a law (Section 28) not unlike the one Russia had passed in 2013. In the first couple of years after the repeal of Section 28, there was nothing legally to stop me being openly queer, but it still felt like a risk. So it was tremendously liberating to be able to be open and be myself on a blog, and not having the sky falling down. When I look back at the posts now, it wasn’t that queer in the grand scheme of things, but it was more so than I remember. I was just being myself.

In other words, me and my blog from 2006 was now breaking the law in Russia from 2016 onwards by just existing.

It doesn’t matter that it would be lucky to have an audience of 30, never mind 3000, or that my posts predate the law- the law is wrong, and my posts suddenly came under it’s jurisdiction some point in 2016 without my knowledge. It was time to take back control.

So, I was thinking about exporting it somewhere, when a friend of mine mentioned Jekyll and using GitHub Pages for his project. As a superqueer supergeek, I just had to have a look into it, and lo! A project was born. All I needed was a way to import the old posts from LiveJournal, and I found that in LJDump. The whole thing took a few hours in total to convert the import to Jekyll and hosted on GitHub pages. Then I couldn’t resist tweaking it… And here we are!

There will be no guarantee that I will post loads of new posts. Also, I’m as interested as much in the backend as I am interested in new content, although I could mix the two and do some posts about what I’ve been doing with the site- although doing that exclusively would be boring even for me!

Anyway, hello again! It’s been a long time! How is everybody?