I accidentally cross-posted my entire LJ archive to Livejournal

My apologies to everyone who is following me on Livejournal! I re-imported my entire Livejournal archive into my blog but I accidentally left my LJ cross-posting plugin turned on, so it got into an infinite loop where I would import a post, and then it would get cross-posted, and then imported again… This meant that duplicates of my old posts dominated everyone’s friends pages. I went back using Xjournal and manually deleted all of the duplicate posts from Livejournal, so everything should be back to normal.

The good news is that all of the old LJ comments have been imported with threading this time, thanks to the new Livejournal importer in the unstable “trunk” version of WordPress 🙂 Huge thanks to Beau for writing the importer, it worked perfectly.

I’m leaving Livejournal: what should I take with me?

I’m moving my blog from LiveJournal to my new personal website at Skyfaller.net, following in the steps of Nick. The rumors about LiveJournal being in danger of shutting down certainly triggered this move, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, to have more control over my own data.

I would like my loyal LJ readers to follow me to my new site, and to achieve that I’d like to make sure that my new blog has all of the features of LiveJournal that my readers find important. Why do you use LiveJournal? What makes it a good experience for you? What features of LiveJournal do you think are useful, and distinguish it from other blogging sites? I have already added a number of features to my blog that LiveJournal has:

  • Threaded commenting – This is included by default in WordPress 2.7 but not all WordPress themes have been updated to use it yet. You also have to turn it on in Settings->Discussion->Other Comment Settings->Enable threaded (nested) comments, it isn’t on by default.
  • Reply notifications by e-mail – Below the comment field is a checkbox labeled “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”. If you check that box, you’ll get an e-mail when someone replies to your comment (if you’ve filled out the e-mail field). I’m using the Subscribe to Comments plugin.
  • Not having to enter identifying info every time – I’ve enabled OpenID using this plugin, so all you have to do is enter in your LiveJournal URL in the website field and it will accept your comment. No need to fill in your name and e-mail each time.

What else should I do? Please let me know in the comments.

I got me a LiveJournal

Well, it’s official, I have now joined the army of Swarthmore students who has a LiveJournal. I don’t really intend to post anything on my livejournal, however, because I prefer to keep control over my own blog. This may seem a bit paranoid, but who ever thought those lamers at mp3.com would go and delete all of the mp3s on their website? If livejournal.com suddenly vanished without a trace, I’d be shafted along with all their other users. On the other hand, with my SCCS webpage, if SCCS suddenly upchucks and dies, I can go wail on the sysadmins, or bribe them to fix it, or become one myself and get the job done.

So yeah, if you have a livejournal, you can add me to your friends, or leave me messages on the page, or anything else that livejournal users tend to do 🙂 I got curious about livejournals for many reasons, one being the apparently huge number of Swatties who have them. I stumbled across one group of people who lived in Mertz with me last year who all had blogs, and were engaging in intense blogcest. I also wanted to try out the Mozilla extension for making entries in livejournals, Deepest Sender, which actually works very well indeed! I even got it to detect my currently playing music in XMMS, as documented on their help page.

All of this livejournal happiness can get a bit creepy though, so maybe I should get a DeadJournal instead. But then again, how cool is it to be dark and depressing anyhow? And annoyingly you have to be invited by someone with an existing account or shell out money. The thing is, they’re trying to limit growth, presumably because of server costs, and this is a good strategy for that… it can’t jump to unconnected communities of people. So much for DeadJournals. They’re dead. Ha, ha! I crack myself up.