Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with livejournal

Who do you like to read?

surenoproblem — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:09:06 -0800

What are some chatty, intelligent, funny personal blogs that I should be following? I used to love reading about people's daily lives on Livejournal, as well as knowing what music, books and films they were enjoying, but I haven't been back to LJ in years, and most of my friends have stopped updating. Something like a more regularly updated Defective Yeti is what I'm looking for. I don't mind if the blog is about a specialised field, but I'm hoping for someone who is funny, who has interesting ideas, or can give me a good glimpse into another person's life.

Thanks!

What is the purpose of this livejournal bot?

anonymisc — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:18:18 -0800

What mischief is this LiveJournal bot up to? An unknown livejournal "user", zdvovl, friended me, so I looked at the profile, and it had friended some of my friends too. (It had a friends list of over 200, about 8 of which were friends of mine). In some cases, there was no-one in the world, besides me, who could possibly know both of those users, or social circles, and there were clusters of friendings that aligned with social circles, so zdvovl was clearly using my friendslist (and those of my friends) to find users to friend. (Likewise, zdvovl was happy to friend ancient clearly-abandoned web-detritus accounts that it found in my friendslist, and other stuff that is unusual for genuine users to do).

I did a google search, and found some recent friendings that zdvovl was no-longer friends with. It appeared that zdvovl was trawling the network of friendships - it would friend users, use their friends list to friend their friends, de-friend them, and thus move through the social web of friendships, maintaining it's friendslist total in the 200s, but quickly making (and recording?) a far far greater number of connections over time. Mapping out who knows who? Recording all public lj entries? I don't know.

True to form, a few days later, zdvovl de-friended my account, and it has moved beyond the circles of users that I know.
Quirk: It doesn't appear to de-friend users that have friended it.

Livejournal has procedures for legitimate search-engine bots to follow, so I assume this is something illegitimate. (The name itself sounds generated - are there more of these bot-users?)

Does anyone know anything about this? Anything similar? What is the likely purpose of this bot? I can come up with a lot of speculative ideas, many of which would be an unwelcome use of Livejournal.

Backing up MANY journals?

FritoKAL — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:18:46 -0800

With Livejournal possibly aiming itself for a demise sometime in the future, I have a techie question that I'm hoping metafilter can answer and save me countless hours of google time. I and several (and by several I mean -45-) friends have a LJ RPG, with five years of history that we do not want to lose. We're very aware there are backup tools, but what I'm looking for is a way to backup communities and journals and their comments -without needing the passwords-, preferable in a mass group. None of the posts are locked, so that's not a concern. (I repeat - we do not want to archive locked posts, no privacy will be violated.)

Is there any such tool? ALL of the programs I have found so far require a password, and given the forgetful nature of people, we'd rather just have a small team on this, since it's 70 journals.

Blog Archaeology!

johnbaskerville — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:47:33 -0800

Would anyone be able to help me uncover remnants of a 1999 era blog called Evol Star or something to that effect? Details inside. The blog was before the height of LiveJournal and MySpace, and it was run by two girls who may or may not have lived in Texas. I always assumed they were roommates. There interests seemed to drift between the Gorillaz, Noam Chomsky, design, and, again, maybe Texas. The girls were hip and featured quite a few photos of themselves and their flat on the website.

There were quite a few introspective, twentysomething styled posts about adult life and that sort of thing, and I, much younger at the that, always thought their blog was the coolest thing out there. Any chance anyone knows what happened to these women?

Google, the Wayback Machine, and MySpace have failed me. My Google-Fu is decent enough, and I would think, given the content that I remember, that these two would have kept on with their internet lives.

Blogger without a blog service

jejune — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:31:20 -0800

Is there a blog service that has all the features I need? I've tried Blogger, Livejournal, and Wordpress.com, but none of them seems like quite the ticket. See inside for the 3 features I'm looking for. I'm trying to start a blog. It seems like every service I try is about 90% of what I need, but missing some key feature.

Here are the features I'm looking for:

1. The ability to have a private blog with well over 100 readers. I could see myself picking up a bunch of readers from my list of Facebook friends, and on top of that I'd like to feel comfortable mentioning the blog to people I meet in the future and casually inviting them to read it without worrying about exceeding the limit. (I'm not willing to have a public blog because I'm paranoid about a prospective employer googling my name one day and being offended by something I say about a controversial issue.)

2. A blogroll that allows well over 50 links. I have over 50 links to put in various categories of my blogroll (not just blogs but also individual articles, favorite Metafilter posts, etc.), and I want to be able to add more as I come across them.

3. Easily customizable templates, or at least a very tasteful default template. I care a lot about the appearance of the blog, and I'd like to have a distinctive combination of greys, blues, and a bit of purple. I don't have programming skills beyond some basic HTML, so I can't create a template from scratch. (I want something sleek and minimal but also with a bit of color and character. Most templates I've seen are either minimal to the point of looking like something from the '90s, or overloaded with color and graphics in a way that seems geared toward 16-year-olds.)

Here's what I've gathered based on trying 3 different services:

- Blogger has nicely customizable templates and plenty of blogroll capacity ... but is limited to 100 private readers.

- Livejournal lets you have 1000 private readers (or more with a paid account) and has so many templates that I can find a palatable one if I really try ... but limits you to 30 with a free account or 50 with a paid account. (I've tried this del.icio.us tool and it doesn't seem to work on LJ)

- Wordpress.com lets you have unlimited private readers for $30 (which I'd gladly pay for), and seems to have good blogroll capabilities ... but there are just a few boringly tasteful templates, they can't be customized at all (nor can you import one from a third party), and the main column is too wide anyway.

I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount of money, but free would be ideal, needless to say.

I've looked through AskMe tags, tried Googling for feature comparisons, and looked at help/FAQ pages from Blogger, Livejournal, and Wordpress. Of course, this turns up tons of information about different features offered by different services, but I'm not seeing a big-picture solution to my problem. (And I'm suspicious of the blog services' official help pages because they seem to try to conceal their limitations.)

Am I missing some way to have everything I want, or is this just not available? If not, then what do you think would be the least-bad option? I realize that the answer might simply be that I'm right -- none of the services work for the above reasons. But I wanted to run this by the hive mind to see if there's either some workaround for the above problems or some other service that offers what I want. I'm honestly on the verge of giving up blogging because there doesn't seem to be a viable service out there.

Livejournal replacement?

Arturus — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 08:53:05 -0800

What's a good replacement for livejournal? Desired features: a modicum of privacy controls and openID authentication for readers. So in light of the ongoing fiasco that is SUP's ownership of livejournal, I'm considering jumping ship. The problem is, my blog there has mostly been of the kind that works best with the livejournal setup and community. In particular, I'd like to continue to make use of privacy controls, preferably with the ability to authenticate my allowed readers through openID. The idea here being that such a setup would make it easy for my friends on livejournal to continue using that identity to read my blog. Wordpress lets you password protect individual posts, or create an non-openID authentication list for your entire journal; what else is out there? Is there any platform besides livejournal that has this sort of feature set?

Coop based social network - startup advice?

symbioid — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:39:12 -0800

I'm looking into starting a co-op based model of a social network site. Any tips? Organization, legal incorporation, possible code-base to start from, how much would hosting/coding such a site cost? I'm a user of LJ, and I think most of us on MeFi know of the 6A fiasco. Recently SUP (the new owners) decided to stop free accounts. They are making many people upset, in their disregard of their advisory board, in the way they announced this (unofficially, hidden in a FAQ, not a news announcment), and in their apparently serious attempt at explaining that they were "streamlining" the process (cuz people are apparently too stupid to understand free vs ad-supported vs paid accounts). Many are insulted by the attitude of SUP towards the user base.

This has led me to realize that people really want community empowerment. A profit-based corporation is not conducive to helping the users of the site. Nor does not having an effective mechanism to empower users.

Hence my idea to start a co-op based site. I was thinking of using LJ code, since most people are familiar with how LJ works. There is (admittedly sparse, AFAICT) documentation, and their are other spinoffs of LJ who have experience, so I believe there's not a shortage of people to help us learn the technical side. On the other hand, the LJ code is a large Perl hack, and that intimidates me. I'd be more comfy with Python or something of that nature. But nothing else offers the same features as LJ. Do we build from the ground up?

What kinds of costs for hosting might accrue? Anybody have experience with creating a co-op? Is a non-profit a good idea, or would the restrictions placed on non-profit create difficult conditions to flourish? Run the site like a non-profit, while still being technically a profit? So many questions, but I feel this is really important. Paying members should have a voice, and they aren't getting that at LJ.

Posting One Thing to Many Blogs?

davidstandaford — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:56:19 -0800

What is the best way to share my blogging when I have different friends on myspace, livejournal, blogspot, facebook. etc. I currently have a myspace blog, a livejournal, and a blogspot blog where I triple post my content. I also sometimes will write facebook notes with the same post.

I'm wondering if people have advice about how to streamline this process and have one application do this for me. Either XP or OS X is a possibility. Is there an easy (free?) way to write something once and have it show up everywhere?

Secondly, does anyone have any experience with trying to integrate multiple blog services into one location. Ideally, the people who like to read me on facebook or myspace or livejournal would all just visit a single blogspot blog and make things easy for me, but I'm not sure they actually will (and these are people who don't know what RSS readers are). Checking their livejournal friends page is probably easier than clicking over to my own separate blogspot blog once a week (if they remember), so I want to keep all the readers, I just don't like having to triple post what I write in all those places.

Why do only Livejournal pages load so slowly on my computer?

Kat Allison — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:40:02 -0800

Livejournal pages (and only Livejournal pages) are loading with excruciating slowness on my desktop computer (and only on my desktop computer). What gives?? For the past week or so, any time I try to open anything on livejournal.com, it takes somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds to load, as compared to the 1 - 10 seconds to load pages from pretty much any other website. This occurs only on my desktop computer (older Windows box running XP SP2); it doesn't happen with my laptop, which has the same OS and is using the same wireless connection.

It's not browser-specific; I get the same problem in Firefox (2.0.0.12), IE7 and Opera 9.25. Despite which, I tried it in Firefox in safe mode with all extensions disabled and with cache/cookies cleared: no difference. It also doesn't make a difference whether I'm logged in or out of Livejournal. I've run a deep system scan on BitDefender, as well as AdAware and SpyBot, and nothing seems amiss there.

Any ideas?

Livejournal authenticated RSS problem

alopez — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:57:21 -0800

Livejournal authenticated RSS feeds on Mac OS 10.4.10: why do they keep losing my credentials? May involve Keychain. I have several friends on livejournal who I'd like to read, along with all of my other feeds, using an RSS reader. Subscribing to their friends-only feeds is easy enough, the URL is just http://username.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest. When I add this feed, the RSS reader prompts for my livejournal userid and password on the first refresh of the feed. At this point, the credentials are stored in my keychain and the newsreader should access it whenever it refreshes the feed. However, usually after a couple of days, the credentials are lost, and the RSS reader prompts for the username and password again. This is really irritating since it does this for half a dozen feeds. Some specifics:

I don't have any other authenticated feeds, so I don't know if this is livejournal-specific or a more general problem.
I have tried three newsreaders: Shrook, Vienna, and NetNewswire Lite. They all have the same problem.
At least with NNWL, I know that the credentials are stored in my keychain as an internet login (one for each feed). When I first authenticate, I can check in Keychain Access to see if the login is stored there, and indeed it is. When NNWL starts prompting me again, I look in Keychain Access again and the login is GONE! Why would that happen? No other credentials are lost from my Keychain, and when I run Keychain First Aid, it reports no problems.

Printing Out Confessions

crayolarabbit — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:00:53 -0800

How do you create a printable version of a livejournal entry's comments when there is more than one page? For the past... year? ish? people at my school have been posting on an Anonymous Confession Board on livejournal. Here is the current iteration, here is the first one, and there have been 7 others in between.

I am utterly fascinated by these, not just because they're kind of about people I know, but because they are so psychologically cathartic. They really demonstrate something about anonymity (I'm not sure what yet, but I'm hoping to do a research project about it in the future). Because of that project, and also because people have always wanted a more searchable format, I've been hoping to find a way to consolidate each of them into one HTML page (the "finished" board generally takes up around 40).

In my search, I came up this greasemonkey script that unfolds all comments on each page. This is a great start, but I'd love something that could "unfold all" pages.

Social Network Friend Hunt

bkdelong — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 10:51:23 -0800

Social Network Safari Hunt - Help me find my friends! I've recently taken the time to mass-update my contact list on both Plaxo and Yahoo! I am also an early adopter on many, many social networks. However, I am so tired of having to wait for my friends to find me and would like to import my contact list as a CSV to said service.

So far I've been able to do this with Facebook and got a note back that the folks at MySpace were fixing this broken feature of theirs. LinkedIn was an early-adopter of this concept as well.

I am very surprised that Flickr and LiveJournal don't allow for this feature - nor services like Twitter and Dodgeball. I can't figure out how to get my Yahoo! Addresses service to check for all my friends with a messenger account or a Yahoo! 360 account.

What other services DO have this feature? I stumbled across FindMeOn.com but haven't used it much yet.

Plaxo also notes which of my contacts have IM accounts - is there a way to auto-import them directly into AIM? What about Yahoo!

Forcing an extension

FunkyHelix — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:23:13 -0800

How do I trick Firefox 2 into using an extension from a previous build? So, I updated to Firefox 2 and one of the extensions I use every day stopped working - LJlogin. It tels you which Livejournal account your logged in with, and lets you switch between them without even visiting the site.

There's a way to trick a firefox into using an extension from a previous build. How? I'm horrible at this stuff, but I loved that extension so much, I'll rip out firefox's guts to fix it.

Anyone have a link to such a thing?

WordPress/LiveJournal cross-posting?

Robot Johnny — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:19:35 -0800

Easiest way to cross-post some (but not necessarily all) entries from a WordPress-powered blog to a LiveJournal account?

Should I switch back...again?

sjuhawk31 — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:47:55 -0800

Is switching blog services just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, or can it get me more readers? I used to blog on TypePad, where I developed a fairly dedicated readership, many of whom I can assume followed me to my current host at LiveJournal. I'd like to expand my readership further; as importantly, I'd like to see the change in readers through comments. LiveJournal's commenting system is pretty lame, and I am thinking that moving to TypePad will open up the commenting floodgates (at least allowing a steady trickle through).

The basic question, I guess, boils down to this: does one blog service lend itself to gathering more readers/commenters than another? Should I jump ship from LiveJournal if I want to grab readers, or should I try to drive more readers to my current site and encourage technically anonymous commenting, welcoming site linking to anyone who wishes to sign their comments that way?

This isn't a "how do I get more people to read my blog" content question, though those suggestions are welcome as well. But what I really want to know is whether my itch to switch is based on a real fact that more people frequent TypePad/Blogger type blogs than the oft-mistaken-for-online-diaries that land on LiveJournal.

Apologies for the massive amount of rambling.

Tracking referrer links and traffic to livejournal?

tastybrains — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:39:37 -0800

What are the best ways to track referrer links & to track traffic to a Livejournal account or community? I am dying to find accurate referrers to a livejournal community and to track the traffic. I've implemented a Sitemeter on the community's profile page, but because LJ disables all javascript, it just gives me a traffic count (and some basic visitor details) to the profile page.

Using Google to look at who is linking to the page is totally inaccurate. When I do that, Google basic terms that are in the title of the community, and search Technorati, I get wildly different results.

I'm really just extremely curious at this point - would love any tips for other resources to figure out who is linking to this particular community.

Help me count hits and track referrers on my LiveJournal site.

shallowcenter — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 13:44:23 -0800

A colleague of mine, as well as a fellow blogger, used BlogFlux's MapStats to track hits and referring addresses with his TypePad site. Now, he's switched over to LiveJournal, which doesn't allow Javascripting, so he's lost the ability to track referring addresses. Does anyone know of a free HTML counter that he can use that will track referrers? He's found some HTML counters that can log hits, and some others that can track referrers with Java, but he's looking for the best of both worlds. Thoughts?

For once, nothing angsty! Film question instead!

spinifex23 — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 12:52:51 -0800

Film/TV question. I've seen LiveJournal avatars and pics that look like they're from a certain TV show or film, and I'm curious as to which film it could be. It looks like a very recent film. It's a white man, maybe in his 40's, with glasses and brown hair. His shirt is red striped, long sleeved, and buttondown, though partially unbuttoned. He has his head tilted back, as if he's shouting, and often the quote with this is "I'm a monster!' or some variant. He's also holding up his left hand, which is a prosthetic hook, attached to a 'flesh' coloured prosthetic arm. The guy almost looks like Giles from Buffy. So, what is this?

Daily Del.icio.us with Livejournal?

joshuaconner — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:12:40 -0800

Is it possible to get Daily Del.icio.us posting to my Livejournal? I've seen a few different posts on getting it to work with MT and a couple on getting it to work with WordPress, but nothing on getting it to work with Livejournal or Blogger (LJ supports the Blogger API).

I tried getting it to run on my own, putting the following things in:

job_name livejournal
out_name my LJ username
out_pass my LJ passwords
out_url http://www.livejournal.com/interface/blogger/blogger.newPost
out_time 3
out_blog_id 443621 (Is this my blog ID? It's the number next to my username on my - self link, sorry - info page.)
out_cat_id blank

...but I just get the following error message:

results:Running at Mon Oct 31 03:17:52 2005 GMT
Fetched 1 items.
metaWeblog.newPost fault was: Failed to access class (metaWeblog): Can't locate metaWeblog.pm in @INC (@INC contains:) at (eval 342) line 3, line 99.

What am I doing wrong? Is this even possible? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I've already asked this question of LJ support, but they just told me stuff I already knew and I didn't want to push it since it's really a Del.icio.us thing, not an LJ thing.

Livejournal and DNS

pxe2000 — Wed, 11 May 2005 14:48:53 -0800

Has anyone else here had trouble getting to Livejournal today? I haven't been able to get to my journal since last night at 11:30 or so. Whenever I've logged onto the page, it takes a few minutes to "open" and then I get a DNS error. This has happened when I've gone straight to the main site, the maintenance site, and even SixApart. I've also had some problems getting to archive.org today. However, I can use the rest of the internets, no problem. Any explanation for this?

How accesible should blog archives be?

themadjuggler — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 13:33:51 -0800

How accessible should the archives of one's blog be? In terms of privacy and security, are there certain things that should not be able to be Googled? Having recently migrated from LiveJournal to MovableType I've realized that much of the past three years of my life is now easily searchable in Google. I'm comfortable with people searching within my blog for past entries, but somewhat more skeptical that such an enormous group of people can have such intimate access to my life.

LiveJournal was more of a community and I chose not to let Google spider my blog. The scope was very small and I talked a lot about my friends and my day-to-day happenings. Still, I took care not to slander anyone, not to leave my address anywhere, and other simple things like that.

However, much of my life remains documented with lots of pictures. Should I worry about identity theft or anything else? Do bloggers generally keep so much personal information available online?

I understand that this seems contradictory to the point of a blog, but is there a point when you can have too much of your life shared on the net?

MoveableType Lists

themadjuggler — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 09:52:36 -0800

Having recently installed MoveableType (after a LiveJournal migration from hell), I'm looking to personalize my blog. I can deal with web design for the templates, but I'm curious as to how people like this guy get listening and reading lists on their index. Slaving over obscure plug-in sites isn't helping. Any suggestions?

Is an LJ image feed bandwidth theft?

brownpau — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 10:29:45 -0800

Is an LJ image feed bandwidth theft?

Weird Google adwords

davebug — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 13:01:15 -0800

What is triggering these odd Google ads? The CMS question below is 3/4ths right-wing ads, the LiveJournal question is employment misconduct ads, the 55-65 yo question is all global warming. Any thoughts what words are triggering each of those?

Archiving LiveJournal

tommasz — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:16:48 -0800

I've got a journal in LiveJournal that I want to download to my home computer prior to deleting. The tool on the LiveJournal site will do this, but only one month at a time. Is there any tool that can handle more than a single month? I'd prefer the XML format, since I might want to do something with them at a later date.