Cutting out the middle man

Since January, my blog, hosted at Blogger, has been mirrored to this LiveJournal account. The mirroring process has worked without a hitch, but I’ve become dissatisfied that although the articles on both sites are the same, I haven’t found a way to do the same for any comments made.

As it happens, I have received almost no comments via Blogger, but quite a few folk are commenting via LiveJournal. This puts me in the situation where my "main" blog is less active than the mirror.

Another cause for dissatisfaction is that the text coming into LJ from Blogger was untidy, and full of break-tags. While these resolved themselves fine on the screen, I could see this was going to be a problem, long-term, unless I put time into writing a script to clean it all up.

I originally decided to go with Blogger, as it allowed me to present the blog as the main page of my website – http://www.filklore.com/. I also liked the fact that you didn’t have to be a member of the Blogger community to comment.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that this could also be done in LiveJournal. The few LJ pages I had seen were very much "in your face" LJ pages, requiring you to have an LJ account yourself before you could participate (or in some cases, even read!).
I’ve now worked out how to present my LJ pages on my own website, and allow non-LJ people to comment; I’ve discovered a stylepage that is pleasing to me; and have just imported all my blog articles previous to the starting of this account. The final act was changing the CNAME for blog.filklore.com to LJ, which should take effect in the next 12-24 hours.

Does this mean I’ve come over to the dark side of blogging? Some may say I have. However, I am determined that my blog remain open and accessible to all readers, whether they are on LiveJournal or not.