LJ Crossposting

I have a bunch of half-written things that I haven’t finished because I haven’t been happy with the state of cross-posting between this blog and Livejournal and I haven’t really had the time to deal with fixing it.

I’m cross-posting to make it easier for friends on LJ to read my blog entries. I find that using LJ to follow friends is a great feature; it’s what keeps me coming back to LJ.

It looks like I have it working now. I currently have it set up to cross-post everything. I’ll be writing a lot more technical articles in the near term, with some non-technical stuff mixed in. If you’d rather that I didn’t cross-post, or didn’t cross-post everything, let me know and I’ll see what I can figure out about limiting it.

I have cross-posting set up to require that comments be left here instead of on LJ. If you want to comment, you can use OpenID to login - instead of creating an account, just use the OpenID option on the account creation page. You can then authenticate yourself with Livejournal and not have another account to keep track of. The cross-posting plugin that I started out using was Live+Press. I was unhappy with it for several reasons.

First, cross-posting was unreliable. Sometimes it just didn’t happen. No errors, no warnings. The article just wouldn’t appear.

Second, I set it up to cross-post an excerpt of the article, and the excerpts were totally random. This was really annoying. I could fix it by hand, but that defeated the purpose of automatic cross-posting.

I had also tried Livejournal Crossposter (also known as LJ-XP). Adam uses it, and it was the first LJ-cross-posting plugin I ran across.

Unfortunately, every time I activated it I got a “fatal error” and no other useful information. And for some reason my web server is uncooperative about providing me with useful errors in its logs (yes, I’ve double-checked the Apache configuration… it’s … something else).

So I’ve just been avoiding posting, which has been frustrating given that the reason I set up a new blog was to write more.

I finally gave up and found and fixed the problem tonight. Hence, this note documenting it for other people who may run into this problem.

Make sure you have the most recent version! There are versions floating around out there which don’t work with Wordpress 2.6. LJ-XP has changed hands once or twice, and some of the older versions don’t point to the correct location for the current plugin (which is http://code.google.com/p/ljxp/). I’m successfully using 2.0.5-r53. If you get version 2.0, you’ll definitely have problems. Beware that if you download it from http://ebroder.net/livejournal-crossposter/, you’re likely to get 2.0 instead of the current version.

With that resolved, it’s easy to setup and use and it works nicely when I post from ecto.

So, on to more writing (and cross-posting)…