Welcome to those of you at LiveJournal.

Every now and then, a friend asks "so when are you coming onto LiveJournal?", and seems to be surprised to hear I already have a blog running, on Blogger. The question then turns into "so when are you going to move it over to LiveJournal?"

Recently I was persuaded to open an LJ account so I could participate in some discussion for an event I am involved with. Despite the statement that the LJ account was for access only, and would not be updated, I was surprised that several people signed up as friends, and others said they were intending to.

The truth is that I am reasonably happy with my modest little blog on Blogger, which was created more to create some interesting content on my web page, rather than a desire to blog or journal. I certainly don’t have time to maintain two – one on Blogger and one on LJ.

So I spent a few hours playing (and no doubt have trodden in the footprints of others) and have come up with a fairly reliable way to republish my Blogger articles on LiveJournal. If everything goes right, this will be the first of them.

I am making no effort, at the moment, to combine comments from the two sites, it is too much effort. I will simply treat Blogger and LJ as two sides of a room at a party – I will tell my news to all, but then any conversations that arise on either site can take their own path.

6 Comments

  1. January 15, 2009
    Reply

    Leaving a reply on your new journal!

    Oh, and if you are posting anything longer than, say, 30 lines, you might want to consider having your script put in one of those nice “this got long, click here to read rest of posting” instructions, which look like this

    <lj-cut text=”this got long, click here to read rest of posting”>

    (note the tag is “lj-cut”)

    This only works on top level postings, not in comments/replies.

    • January 15, 2009
      Reply

      Cheers

      I had seen that, and it was on my list of things to think about, but I thought I would see what the normal practice was. 30 lines sounds reasonable.

      I am pretty certain I can do that from within my script. I’ll give it a try

      • January 15, 2009
        Reply

        I had a try at scripting the lj-cut, but it was horrible. As my script is working with text already in printed-quotable format, the end of a physical line is not necessarily th end of a sentence, resulting in the lj-cut usually coming mid-word. As I don’t intend to parse the whole message, I have rethought the idea.

        Blogger does not have an equivalent of lj-cut, although there are several easy hacks available, using the span tag. I have appropriated one of these techniques and combined it with lj-cut, using both tags in my posting. Of course, being tags, they are invisible when rendered on page. Thus the lj-cut tag doesn’t not interfere with Blogger, and the span (blog-cut) tag doesn’t mess up LJ.

        I keep creative control of my posts, cutting them at the best point, readers on both Blogger and LJ are presumably happy, and because I am also using the /lj-cut tag (I may as well as the Blogger solution requires a /span), I keep my Blogger attribution on the end of the messages, even after cutting.

  2. January 15, 2009
    Reply

    [WAVES] Hello!

    Part of the reason for “friending” your account was to let you have access to “friends only” posts on my journal, should you feel inclined to go see what you’ve been missing out on. =:o}

    I daresy others friended you for the same reason, or for a declaration of solidarity or something (“don’t worry if this guy turns up and starts commenting, guys, he’s one of ours!”), or maybe just to create a reminder on their own profile page that you were out there, somewhere…

    Thing is, the “friend” concept in LJ is a bit overloaded with meanings/implications (which can sometimes lead to drama with more sensitive members). Some of us have been campaigning for years to have it split into the two roles of “people I read” and “people I allow to read my restricted entries”, but so far without success.

    • January 15, 2009
      Reply

      I understand, and I tend to agree about the misnaming of “friends”. There is a similar thing over on BoardGameGeek, where they have GeekBuddies.

      In Blogger land, the equivalent relationship is called “followers”, which I think is a little more emotionally neutral.

      Perhaps we could now persuade LiveJournal to rename “friends” as “droogs”?

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