Creeva’s World 2.0

Live jour­nal is another online blog that focuses on com­mu­nity.   While it is not as active and com­mu­nal as Vox, it is infi­nitely more focused on true inter­ac­tion between users com­pared to Myspace, Face­book, or any other of the more tra­di­tional col­lect as many friends as you can poke­mon style social net­work.   I can say that in rank­ings of com­ments and feed­back I get back from read­ers that my live journal is only to third to my vox and my main blog in terms of inter­ac­tion.  Live jour­nal has been so suc­cess­ful that there are deriv­a­tive sites that use the live jour­nal engine, the steps listed below should allow you (with some tweak­ing) to post to any of those sites as well.

I really wish I could say that I had options for you to cross­post to live jour­nal from Vox or Blog­ger, but cur­rently unless you have a paid account you won’t be able to use the post by e-mail method I men­tioned in the Vox arti­cle.  If you do how­ever wish to use a method and have a paid live jour­nal sub­scrip­tion the steps are sim­i­lar to the steps in the vox article.

Since my main blog is word­press I of course us a plu­gin to facil­i­tate the cross­post­ing — Live­Jour­nal Cross­poster to be exact.   When word­press 2.5 was released there was some issues with this plu­gin, but it’s since been updated and cor­rected.   To con­fig­ure this plu­gin you do the fol­low­ing steps.

1. Down­load and install the plugin

2. Acti­vate the plu­gin in your word­press instal­la­tion on your plu­gin tab

3. Go to your set­tings tab and click on the live jour­nal option

4.  Fill in the fol­low­ing options:

• LiveJournal-compliant host:  (If you are using a LiveJournal-compliant site other than Live­Jour­nal (like Dead­Jour­nal), enter the domain name here. Live­Jour­nal users can use the default value)
• LJ User­name
• LJ Pass­word
• Com­mu­nity: (If you wish your posts to be copied to a com­mu­nity, enter the com­mu­nity name here. Leav­ing this space blank will copy the posts to the spec­i­fied user’s jour­nal instead)

That gives you the most basic con­fig­u­ra­tion of this plu­gin, how­ever unlike many other word­press plu­g­ins that would end there, live­jour­nal cross­poster gives you a myr­iad of more options.  Here are a few more things you can tweak:

• Cross­post header/footer loca­tion — choices at the top or bot­tom of the post
• Set blog name for cross­post header/footer — you can use your own blog’s title or a cus­tomer title
• Cus­tom cross­post header/footer — gives you the option for cus­tom cod­ing in the header or footer
• Pri­vacy level for all posts to Live­Jour­nal — choices are pub­lic, pri­vate, or friends
• Should com­ments be allowed on Live­Jour­nal? — You can force com­men­tors to come back to your blog to com­ment or allow them to com­ment directly in live jour­nal (I just let them go directly onto live journal’s site)
• Tag entries on Live­Jour­nal? — Choices are –Tag Live­Jour­nal entries with Word­Press cat­e­gories only, Tag Live­Jour­nal entries with Word­Press cat­e­gories and tag, Tag Live­Jour­nal entries with Word­Press tags only, and Do not tag Live­Jour­nal entries.
• How should LJXP han­dle More tags? Choices are - Link back to Word­Press, Use an lj-cut, and Copy the entire entry to Live­Jour­nal.
• Select Cat­e­gories to Cross­post — You have the option to choose which cat­e­gories of posts you wish to send over to live jour­nal.  This allows you to tar­get which posts and top­ics you wish to share, a big boon for some online pub­lish­ers who are capa­ble of writ­ing on topic.

I think live­jour­nal cross­post should be a bench­mark plu­gin for all other cross­post­ing plu­g­ins to come.   You can cross­post to live jour­nal from other ser­vices, such as Utterz or Ping.fm — and I’ll be cov­er­ing the Live Jour­nal cross­post­ing func­tions from those sites when I get to those articles.

The next arti­cle in the series will cover the dif­fer­ence between cross­post­ing end­points and cross­post­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion points.

Pre­vi­ous Entries in The Cross­post­ing God Series:

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 1 — The Introduction

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 2 — Vox