MILES to GO || before I sleep

Do you remember when LiveJournal used to be cool? You had to get an invite to even get a journal there. It was not only exclusive, it was run well. It just seemed to work. You didn't have this big complicated install, where you had to understand CGI or PHP or any of that stuff. You just went to the website, logged in, and wrote. You could get comments if you wanted, attach different moods and icons to each post to express yourself. You could organize things into Memories, and later, add tags. You could customize the look of your own journal, get friends, join communities.

You can still do all of that, and more (Scrapbook! Games!) but it's bloated now. I think everything went downhill the minute the site got sold to SixApart. They didn't know what the hell they were doing, and when SixApart sold it to whatever Russian company owns it now, it got even worse.

The amount of spam I get on my various posts throughout my LiveJournal history has increased nearly exponentially over the past few years. Communities are the one and only thing that LiveJournal and similar sites (like Dreamwidth, bless its heart) have over better, spam-free, more customizable blogging software--like WordPress, which I am now using for pretty much all of my websites.

I remember trying to deal with some of the spam over the past few days while my computer was "recovering" from an Erase and Install of the OS. I was busy installing updates and such, so I couldn't do it on there. I tried accessing the LiveJournal mobile site on my iPad, and I couldn't even tap on the login boxes, because every time I did, it thought I was tapping on the LiveJournal logo, so it just took me back to the homepage. It's because the mobile site wasn't properly optimized, and the full site must have used some Java that caused the login box to move around on the main banner. The mobile site--if one can even log into it--sucks, and that's becoming an increasingly dangerous thing in this day and age. Something that's BUILT to be accessible and responsive should be a priority for websites of any kind in this day and age. It's definitely something I'm aspiring to for my sites.

It's no longer a case of LiveJournal working; it's a matter of "if" and "when" -- it's also getting hit more and more frequently with DDoS attacks or other various outages that are never fully explained. LiveJournal doesn't have any sort of reliable presence to notify us of such outages AS they happen, so people are left in the dark. Sure, LiveJournal isn't exactly a crucial service, but it's still a pain in the butt when you're trying to access something specific--or perhaps writing something important--and all of a sudden you can't access it. If you've paid for any portion of the service--which a lot of people had, including me, way back in the day when I thought a Permanent Account might be a good idea--then you're essentially losing money for every moment of downtime, which is why LiveJournal is probably bleeding out its coffers trying to pay back users for all their lost time.

I'll miss it, but honestly? Bring back the blogroll. I can import my LiveJournal into WordPress now, maybe even figure out a way to crosspost it here to Dreamwidth (because I like Dreamwidth and at least want to support its continued development via communities I run), then I can just do everything I want from one single place. That'd be nice.

Testing to see if Dreamwidth and MacJournal (which I just nabbed from the new MacHeist nanoBundle) work well together.

Yes, and here's how:

Go to Journal > Edit Blog Settings

FIRST TIME SETUP ONLY:
Step 1: Type in your URL; MacJournal will fill in the http://.
Step 2: Type your User Name and Password; save it in the Keychain if you wish.

Step 3/BLOG SETUP EDITS:

-In the window that appears, type "Dreamwidth" or similar for the Name.
-Select "LiveJournal" for the type, since Dreamwidth is a port of LiveJournal (so to speak)
-For the URL, type your blog's complete URL, such as http://yournamehere.dreamwidth.org.
-The Post URL is this: http://www.dreamwidth.org/interface/xmlrpc
- Finally, type your user name in the User ID field. You shouldn't need to type anything in the blog ID field.

You can post by clicking on Share > Send to "Dreamwidth" (or whatever you've named your journal in MacJournal in Step 3). A blue bar will appear at the bottom of the screen if you've successfully posted. If you have crossposting set up on Dreamwidth, it will also crosspost to any other journaling services (e.g. LJ) that you have set-up there.

I recommend having the Inspector open so you can do things like add Tags; this field is not in the MacJournal window by default.

While you can see Moods, Friend Groups, and User Pictures in the sidebar when you click on Edit Blog Settings, there does not appear to be a way to actually include these in your individual entries at this time (please correct me if I'm wrong).

There is not a way to post to communities now or for the foreseeable future. This is something I discovered by perusing the Mariner Software forums. It's sad, but it's true, which means I likely won't be using MacJournal for much.

The next best bet? iJournal. It's got all the best features (though it's not exactly Semagic for Mac), though for me right now, it's being REALLY slow and constantly checking my friends' page for updates (even though it never bothers to tell me if there ARE any). It also used to notify me when my post was received by Dreamwidth, but now it just clears the window. Kind of scary!

xJournal appears to be at a standstill dev-wise, but I keep it around because I have old entries in that format still.