I’m feeling an itch to move my LJ to a nicer blogging system. I’d like to have some more control over the design, and generally a more advanced system I can modify and integrate and so on…
But, while I think I can handle the technology side, I really don’t want to lose my place in the LJ community. I’d like to remain on people’s friends pages, to get LJ people’s comments, etc.
So I was wondering – anyone know of a good way of cross-posting between LJ and another blog? To keep the two in sync, if possible? If it comes to it, anyone know of a technology underpinning LJ that might be used to do this?
Steve Cooper's Personal Blog 
12 responses to “A terrible and vague sense of dissatisfaction with LJ”
Isn’t that more or less what RSS feeds do?
(I have no idea about the technology itself, mind you, so i could be wrong here!)
RSS feeds, I think, monitor what you’ve posted to your LJ. I’m looking at it from the other direction, where I want to post to a blog – probably on http://www.mindfiresoftware.co.uk/ – and for LJ to trail it, for want of a better word.
Actually, the word is Mirror. That’s the word I’m looking for. I want LJ to be a mirror of my primary blog.
I have a nasty feeling this’ll be one of those ‘cake and eat it’ decisions.
Hm; perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology, but I certainly have feeds on my f’list of blogs which are held primarily off Lj, but are syndicated to LJ, if that makes sense; this, for example.
RSS feeds can work the other way — you can offer things from another source as an RSS feed to LJ if your other blogging system allows this. However, my experience is that people tend not to do this. The think about LJ is while people bitch about the interface, it’s the friends list and the comments that make it work.
You could probably use the RSS feed (assuming they have one) on your primary blog, then run some form of script (cron + PHP) to pull the latest entry off and post it to LJ.
I _think_ it’s possible, you might have to rumage to figure out how to post to LJ via a command line though…
OT: Are you Wendyhousing tomorrow?
links his blog to LJ via a feed – you could ask him for advice
Ah, it’s Alex! … my nemisis… 😉
My blog is actually at:
http://www.bennee.com/~alex/news.php
Which uses the handy little Personal Weblog PHP class. Most blogs allow provide for generating RSS feeds. The LJ user stsquad_real basically just takes the RSS feed and publishes it in LJ where people can make comments.
Two wrinkles:
1. As an “external” feed you don’t own it in the LJ sense so you do not get notified about postings to the entries. I get round this by maintaining a paid for LJ account so I can use a custom stylesheet which provides an RSS feed from my LJ friends page that includes comment updates. (The URL is
http://www.livejournal.com/users/stsquad/friends/?s2id=1316611).
2. Comments are not backed up so when entries date they get lost for ever. To get around this I have a 3 line cron script on my server that mirrors LJ’s copies (with comments) of my pages:
#!/bin/bash
cd $HOME/public_html/news_archive
# Do the wget
wget -r -l 1 -np -k http://www.livejournal.com/users/stsquad_real/
# Remove the index.html as it will always be out of date
rm -f http://www.livejournal.com/users/stsquad_real/index.html
Phew! This is all way beyond my level of comprehension. I was just going to suggest cut and paste, but that would require maintaining two systems. But selecting all, copying, and pasting doesn’t seem too much to do … and it sure as hell is simple. Just a thought. Lots of blogs out there.
Mark, it’s a damned fine suggestion, and one I’m gonna give serious thought to.
I have this tendency with techie solutions to go for these things that take days to set up and save me seconds. I feel something similar might be happening here. Your suggestion might just save me a whole bunch of time and effort 😉
My job here is done. (salutes, flips head back, straightens cape and flies off into the sunset)
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