Apparachik is a misspelling; it should be apparatchik, with a t.

With the t, Google reports 30000 results, with dictionary and encyclopedia definitions in the first ten. Without the t, there are 300 results. But no Did you mean link. I'm not sure how Google detects misspellings, but it fails in this case.

Now Evan's post has changed things again: the Jargon Database definition is the first result for apparachik, and the Bloglines page is gone.

And of course, the plural of apparatchik should be apparatchiki (аппаратчики)!

I have moved my weblog and its posts from Advogato to Blogger. It used to live here.

Setting up the Blogger weblog was relatively painless, though time-consuming. Here are some of the steps that took time:

• Cleaning up the HTML of the template I chose to validate cleanly. I also tweaked the template in various ways, including pulling the CSS out into a separate file.
• Copying posts across. I did this by hand. It would be possible to automate this, but given the number of posts, and because most posts needed light editing to fit well into their new home, it wasn't worthwhile.
• Blogger only generates Atom feeds. I used FeedBurner to convert that to RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds. I now have a script to copy the FeedBurner-generated feeds to my website regularly.
• Generating the links list from my RSS reader subscription list. Most of the weblogs I read have a single author, and so I wanted to list the names of the authors; these are more meaningful that the weblog titles. But although most (all?) weblog software knows the name of the author, this information is not easily extracted from the feed. The dc:creator element is the most logicial source of this information, where present, but its use is so inconsistent as to make it useless. I wrote a Python script to guess a feed's author based on the title, description and copyright elements, but that approach only worked for about 50% of my feeds, so I fixed the rest up by hand.