Real names, and musing upon LJ features
I am spectacularly bad with names.
I remember facts about people, but the arbitrary proper nouns attached to them doesn't stick in my brain well.
This isn't helped by people having many names they go by, in the form of usernames, email addresses, as well as their actual names.

These days I find that I tend to have a better chance of remembering real names than usernames, since the real name is what I call that person by. I frequently find myself struggling to remember what a certain friend's LJ username is here, and thus here is my wishlist for LJ and DW:

I'd like LJ to list my friends in a column, NOT a huge comma-separated list. I want the second column of this list to contain their actual name. By default it should be the name they entered in their profile, but I should be able to override this privately to put my alias for that person there. (Usually I'd just put their actual name there, but I might put more info for some people who share the same name, or perhaps their organisation or community I know them through.)

Then I want to be able to sort that list by either the first OR second columns. I also want to be able to filter this list by the Custom Friend Filters I have already setup elsewhere.



This seems like a sensible feature to me, and I've been half-expecting it to turn up for the past couple of years. Come on LJ, what's going on? The current system is archaic and a pain in the arse :(

I have signed up to Dreamwidth, because I kind of intended to go about fixing the things that make me resent using LJ there, as I gather they're a lot more receptive to patches and change.. Although I suspect that plan is going to go the way of most of my private projects, ie. I'll get back halfway and then start something else :)

*waves hello at eventbot, votebot, wineblogger, rmidet, the facebook port of eventbot, dryftsite, ljfilter, reamirror*

Although to be fair, reamirror, eventbot and votebot do work and are used by people regularly, I just haven't finished the feature set I planned.. rmidet was abandoned because I didn't really have enough knowledge of the requirements..
I did open-source rea-toys and rea-www so at least other people can hack on them.

I should finish up ljfilter sometime, I still think the concept is great :)
It sucks down your LJ friends page, and then runs a spam-assassin-style filter (bayesian plus plugins) over every post, and asks you to rate the post. The idea is that after it has learnt enough, it can then start excluding posts from your view based on the filter results.
Thus, you could read your friends page at 5-star rating to only see critically interesting posts, or 1+-star if you want to to see every bloody meme and quiz result. (Not that those seem to be such a problem these days, at least on the friends filters I use now.)