More Journaling Changes
I’m glad that InsaneJournal’s back, but the prospect of potentially losing data from over there made me nervous. I’ve got my entries backed up, but not comments, so I decided that I’m only going to allow comments in one place: my own journal, on my own server, where I can back up as regularly as I want, and move servers if the one I’m on proves unreliable. I just want to have control over my own data, and not feel jerked around at the whim of some company.
Anyway. So I’m turning off comments everywhere but there. I love getting comments, and I welcome and encourage you to comment there. It works pretty much the same as LJ; comments are threaded and if someone replies to your comment you’ll get an email. You can preview comments, and I’m working on adding the ability to edit comments. You can even post with your default LJ/IJ/JF icon; just enter your journal URL as “Website” when you comment, and the system will grab it automatically. And if you don’t want to enter your name every time you comment, you can always register; it’s my server, so the only person who’ll see your email address is me, and I promise not to spam you.
I’m also crossposting to Journalfen now in addition to InsaneJournal, so if you’re as fed up with LiveJournal as I am, there are plenty of places you can read my journal instead.
I apologize if this annoys you, and I realize that I’m bound to lose a lot of comments this way. But it only takes a tiny bit more effort to comment there instead of here, and I feel much safer having everything on my own server. I have to do what’s right for me.
You may also notice that my userpics and mood icons appear differently depending on which journal layout you’re using. This is because I integrated my crossposting system with the avatar and mood plugins I’m using on my own journal, so you’re seeing data pulled from my own server. Again, I apologize if it annoys you, but it’s a tiny inconvenience for you and it makes my data much safer.
BTW, for those who have been following my journal migration saga, I figured out how to import comments with threading preserved. So all of my old LJ comments have been copied to my blog with threads preserved. :) If you’re interested in doing the same, let me know and I’ll write a tutorial.
Current Mood: 
weird
33 Responses to “More Journaling Changes”
cindergal on April 16, 2008 8:43 pm | Link
So all of my old LJ comments have been copied to my blog with threaded preserved. :)
Well, almost. :-) I was re-reading your morally ambiguous rogues post and our conversation about Sirius seems to have fallen into the veil or something. *g*
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rusty-halo on April 16, 2008 8:54 pm | Link
Argh. The universe hates me today, doesn’t it? It lost my reply to you and my reply to wisemack, from that thread.
All the entries from March 1 onward had to be imported via a different, less reliable method (because LJ Archive, the export program, couldn’t get past March 1 2008 for some weird reason). So the good news is that the only entries missing comments will be from that period. I thought I’d caught all the stragglers, though. >:(
I’ll go through and fix it… thanks for letting me know.
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elke-tanzer.insanejournal.com on April 16, 2008 9:33 pm | Link
I figured out how to import comments with threading preserved. So all of my old LJ comments have been copied to my blog with threaded preserved. :) If you’re interested in doing the same, let me know and I’ll write a tutorial.
Holy sweet merfical heaven, YES PLEASE.
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rusty-halo on April 16, 2008 9:39 pm | Link
Haha, no problem. Are you familiar with phpMyAdmin?
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elke-tanzer.insanejournal.com on April 16, 2008 9:41 pm | Link
Only in passing, but I’m willing to learn more.
*leaves an offering of virtual chocolates for you*
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 2:04 am | Link
Your wish, my command.
It sounds really complicated now that I’ve written it all out, but it didn’t take me that long to figure out, let alone do.
Let me know if you have any questions, or if I left out anything important!
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redeem147 on April 16, 2008 9:51 pm | Link
If people can’t click ‘click here to comment’ they must not have had much to say. Though is comment box is rather odd and perpendicular.
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 12:03 am | Link
Good point.
Yeah, and you’re right, it does look weird. It came that way and I haven’t bothered changing it yet. I think maybe I’ll just make it a horizontal line with the comment link under it, instead of a box…
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abbylee on April 17, 2008 12:20 am | Link
Oh, please. There’s something about the default box that bothers me every time someone uses this plugin.
(My issue, I know. My issue.)
Have you thought about enabling OpenID? I’ve used this plugin, with modifications, with success: http://the-notebook.org/12/01/2006/openid-comments-for-wordpress/
I had to change the default LJ URLs, because it’s old, and stuff like that. But the framework was the best option at the time and I haven’t bothered looking for others since.
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 1:05 am | Link
I haven’t been able to get OpenID working with threaded comments. I tried a few plugins and they all worked great, except they lost the parent comment id and thus no OpenID comments appeared in the right threads. I’d love to get it working, though, and will probably keep trying.
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soundingsea on April 16, 2008 10:13 pm | Link
Just wanted to tell you that this is super-cool.
I need non-work-hours unpaid sysadmin work like I need a… thing I don’t need at all, so I don’t see myself setting this up, but I think it’s awesome that you have. :)
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 12:04 am | Link
Thank you so much. :)
(And thanks for commenting here!)
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versaphile on April 16, 2008 11:23 pm | Link
Can you transfer comments to another journaling system or only wordpress?
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 12:00 am | Link
You mean like to InsaneJournal or Journalfen? I haven’t figured out a way; it would be a lot more complicated. (Among other things, you’d run the risk of people not having the same usernames on each site. And no crossposting script would have permission to post as each user anyway, so it would probably have to post as the main journal user and repost the commenter’s name at the top of the comment. That said, I could see it being theoretically possible, but I haven’t heard of anyone building a way to do it yet…)
Thanks for commenting here, btw. :)
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versaphile on April 17, 2008 12:25 am | Link
Well, you’ve kinda eliminated all the other options. To be honest I’d prefer the LJ/IJ interface, but it’s your journal, as they say.
It probably doesn’t matter to you or you wouldn’t have made the switch, but I make huge use of friendslock and filters, so I couldn’t do a public blog like this. Also, do you have the site open or blocked for spidering?
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 1:02 am | Link
WordPress has a setting to automatically block spiders, like LiveJournal does, which I’ve enabled. I haven’t had any problems with unwanted traffic.
I do post friendslocked entries, which I’m continuing here. WordPress lets you post “private” entries, which by default are visible to the blog owner only. I set it so that “private” posts are visible to a group called “friends.” (You can organize registered users into groups, so if people I know register here I’ll add them to my “friends” group and they’ll be able to read and comment on private entries.)
This enables me to post public and friends-locked entries, and I can still post completely private entries as drafts. The only thing I can’t do is post filtered entries to specific groups, although it probably wouldn’t be too hard to do with a bit of hacking. (The annoying part is that it requires people to register here in order to be added to my friends group. But at least that’s a one-time thing. I haven’t been posting as many flocked entries recently, because so few people have signed up here, but I’m sure I’ll find something to whine about and get back to it soon enough. And people can either sign up or not, depending on whether they think it’s worth the effort to comment on my emo.)
Of course, there is no syndication option for private entries, which is part of why I’m still cross-posting everything. Otherwise I’d just tell people to subscribe to my RSS feed. This way I can still take advantage of LJ/IJ/JF’s friendslock feature. (I suppose I’m hoping that someone will eventually invent some kind of journal-system-independent method of syndicating filtered content.)
WordPress also has a lot of features that I like better than LJ’s; mainly that it gives me a lot more control and lets me back up my data however I want. But it’s also got lots of nifty plugins and more advanced features. I know it’s not for everyone, but it’s working well for me.
I really don’t want to lose friends over this. I’m just not comfortable relying on LJ (or IJ, or JF) with content that means so much to me, and I hope people will understand that.
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Verily on April 19, 2008 4:53 am | Link
Random: If you’re interested in filters, I’ve found the Category Access filter works great for it with some tweaking so your metadata doesn’t show in your templates.
I’m still setting up my own journal, but you and your posts have been helpful to me, so I thought I’d pass that along. :)
Curious, though, how did you end up posting your avatars/moodtheme through to livejournal? I’m still trying to figure out how I want to do that.
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rusty-halo on April 22, 2008 1:48 pm | Link
Awesome; thank you for the link to Category Access.
I ended up hacking the LJ/IJ/JF crossposter scripts to pull avatars and userpics into the post that gets cross-posted. (It’s just formatting them directly into the text of the post rather than connecting them with LJ/IJ/JF’s userpics/mood theme system.)
At some point I’m planning to clean up the code and share it with the world. It’s not hard if you know PHP, and someone with more skill could do a much better job of it than I did.
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Verily on April 22, 2008 2:16 pm | Link
Ahh, okay. I thought that might be it. I’m considering trying to get the crossposter to recognize a keyword setup on the wordpress end to post the correct avatar/mood, but just posting what wordpress shows might be easier, really.
Also, since you might be interested, I managed to tweak the crossposter to use wordpress tags to tag rather than categories, since I’m using the categories as filters with category access. It’s really just adequate right now, not perfect (some funny thing about it not posting the tags on first publish, if you don’t save the entry in wordpress first), but if you want, I can upload what I have.
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rusty-halo on April 22, 2008 2:18 pm | Link
Oooh, awesome. I’d love to see it.
I decided to go with posting what WordPress shows because basic accounts aren’t allowed to create their own mood themes, and have a limited number of icons. This way I can have unlimited icons and easily change my mood theme across every journal.
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Verily on April 22, 2008 2:25 pm | Link
I’m using 2.5, not 2.3.3, but if you take the same code and paste it over the category-posting-as-tags section in the version you’re using, I think it should work okay.
Here you go.
Yeah, I was just thinking that… since then there wouldn’t be the awkward limitation of which service allows for how many userpics uploaded either, and having to compensate for using an icon you don’t have uploaded on a particular service, heh.
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rusty-halo on April 28, 2008 5:28 pm | Link
Thank you so much–I used this code and it’s working perfectly. It’s nice not to have to tag and categorize everything! :)
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Yonmei on April 17, 2008 3:33 am | Link
Good for you. I really, really need to do something like this.
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blue_rose on April 17, 2008 6:30 am | Link
Psst… how do I get onto JournalFen?
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 12:02 pm | Link
I think someone with a paid account has to request an account for you? I’m not entirely sure. Someone with a paid account got mine for me.
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Cass on April 17, 2008 11:38 am | Link
Hey,
Did you have to hack to get your userpic to show up in your rss feed? I’m using Post Avatar as well but I’ wondering if it’s a WPMU thing - but my moods and tags show up fine. You also have a much neater footer for your RSS - I need to work out how to clean mine up a bit, it’s way too busy…
Thanks for all the continuing work on this - I’m getting close to allowing friends to join my WPMU site and every little bit of info helps!
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rusty-halo on April 17, 2008 12:11 pm | Link
I’m using BetterFeed to make the RSS footer prettier.
There’s a really easy hack to get your PostAvatar userpic to show up in your feed. Here is what the creator told me, which worked:
Open up gkl-postavatar.php and look for the function “gkl_postavatar_filter”.
It looks like this:
function gkl_postavatar_filter($content) {global $post, $gkl_AvatarURL, $gkl_myAvatarDir, $wp_query;
if (!$wp_query->is_feed)
gkl_postavatar();
return $content;
}
Remove the line:
if (!$wp_query->is_feed)
So the code is now:
function gkl_postavatar_filter($content) {global $post, $gkl_AvatarURL, $gkl_myAvatarDir, $wp_query;
gkl_postavatar();
return $content;
}
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Cass on April 28, 2008 6:20 am | Link
Thanks, that worked great! :)
I noticed you mentioned in a comment above that you’ve hacked the IJ/LJ crossposting plugins to gank your usericons and moods for crossposting - would you care to share the code? I’d love to have that functionality as still 90% of people who I want to read my locked posts are on LJ.
Something you might be interested in, I did just find this handy dashboard removing plugin, which is a step up on privacy for WP as it removes that last mention of higher user level locked posts or comments than the logged in subscriber level user should have access to.
Couple of other plugins I’ve found recently that you might be interested in include Edit N Place [which won’t work properly on WPMU, but looks ace] and organizer which is just brilliant if you want an inbrowser solution for when you can’t ftp something, or prefer not to ftp anyway. Also found a nice WPMU comment organiser which isn’t so useful for a solo WP blog but I think would be nice for friends to be able to track their comments on your site, even though it’s just a single blog. Does look like Brian’s Latest Comments will do something similar but even prettier for single WP installs if you are interested :)
Also I [and my SO, really more him than me!] have made a hack of Cricket Moods that has the standard LJ moods defined as default, rather than the WP smilies [though you do have to upload a set first for the defaults to be active of course], and has a dropdown list for the Write page instead of the huge list of checkboxes, with single mood only definition [would like to make it multiple but have not been able to get that to work with the dropdown yet]. I can’t believe how much time I’m spending on this, but I’m hoping it will be helpful to other people in the end!
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rusty-halo on April 28, 2008 8:30 pm | Link
Thank you for the dashboard remover plugin–that’s awesome. :)
BTW, I’ve started using the Disclose Secret plugin in connection with Role Manager and it seems to be the best version of friends-filtering I’ve found. I can make as many “roles” as I want (ie “All Friends,” “Emo filter,” “Doctor Who filter”, “Rant filter,” etc) and assign users to them. Then I can assign each post to be visible to as many “roles” as I want (so a Doctor Who rant would go in “Rant filter” and “Doctor Who filter”). It’s still not integrated with IJ/LJ/JF, but I can go in and set those custom friends groups manually.
I need to clean up the avatar and mood cross-posting code and then I’ll post it here. :)
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rusty-halo on April 28, 2008 9:21 pm | Link
And I published the avatar and mood crossposting script. Here you go!
http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2558
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Nic on June 7, 2008 10:29 am | Link
Hi, I came here from the lj2wordpress comm and I’ve found the things you’ve got about friends locking on WP and comment threading especially helpful, but other things too for getting my WP blog to do more things I want it to.
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rusty-halo on June 25, 2008 1:35 pm | Link
Thank you! Glad I could help. :)
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