More insidious ways to get your friends onto LJ

[chanaleh]

I have at least partially succeeded... 'cause although Matthew's still not personally on LJ, now his blog is! He got at least a rudimentary RDF going, which I added to LJ as a syndicated RSS feed. So now you can, at least nominally, find him by checking out mattrolls. If you have a paid account, you can add him to your friends list and see all his updates. And when he gets the process more under his control, he might actually include the whole bodies of the posts in the feed, so you can read it right through LJ and never know the difference. Sweet!

Comments

Go you!

[zogathon.livejournal.com]

That ROCKS.

[cheshyre]

He got at least a rudimentary RDF going, which I added to LJ as a syndicated RSS feed.

Ooh! How do you do that?

My journal is blogger based, and I'm unwilling to give up the convenience of having my journal as a part of my site. But I know there are many people who don't read it because it's not part of their regular LJ fix.

I'd really be interested in hearing if there's some way of syndicating my journal onto LJ...

Some comments

[(Anonymous)]

One thing I'm concerned about is that readers will add comments to the LJ feed of my blog rather than the blog itself. I'm not likely to see comments added to the LJ feed, but I definitely look for comments on my blog. This is actually a disincentive for me to add the body of my posts to the feed. I've been thinking about it, and thinking that adding the first paragraphs only from each post might also be an option, but if that results in people not actually clicking through to my site, that would be counterproductive from my perspective.

As to cheshyre's question, the ugly answer is that I'm updating it by hand. After I update my blog, I open up the RDF file and add the info about the new post. I'm thinking it shouldn't be too difficult to add the necessary formatting to the blog template so I can just run a script on the blog to generate the RSS after I do each update, which would be an improvement, but still not ideal. Also, I'm hosting the RSS feed on a different site than the blog itself, because I can't upload files to the blog.

I also use blogger. I know that Blogger Pro has at least beta support for generating RSS, but that's only useful if you're willing to pay or already paying for it. Other blog tools seem to have varying support. LJ generates RSS, which is handy for me to read my friends' LJ posts without having an account.

Once you've created a feed, LJ has a way to turn it into a virtual LJ user, which you can add to your friends list only if you have a paid account. Chanaleh probably has more info on how to do that than I do.

Matthew

Re: Some comments

[cheshyre]

Thanks for the info.

One thing I'm concerned about is that readers will add comments to the LJ feed of my blog rather than the blog itself

Isn't there a way in LJ to turn commenting off?

Re: Some comments

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

When you post individual entries, yes; but since "syndicated" (RSS-fed) entries are all automated, I don't know that there's an option to disable commenting globally.

LJ FAQ on RSS syndication