Whoops (Cross-Blog Side Effects)

[dglenn]

Hmm. I shoulda seen that coming ...

When mirroring an LJ entry to GJ and IJ, if the entry contains an tag (e.g. examplename => examplename), the IJ and GJ copies of the entry will interpret the same tag as linking to a user of the same name on those sites. And similarly, if I try to link to a GJ

Comments

[dglenn]

Right now, with a very blunt instrument. Since I normally post from a Unix command line using 'clive', I threw together an almost-useful shell script that posts the same text file to each of the three sites in succession (and similarly modified the QotD script that 'cron' calls).

I've still got a lot of work to do on tools. I need to improve the wrapper script to handle multi-word subjects correctly or hack the 'clive' source code to post to multiple sites simultaneously; I should add user tag expansiom to either 'clive' or my wrapper script as marnanel suggested; I want to find a way to synchronize edits to the same entry on all three sites (that's the biggest PITA right now); I ought to implement some sort of linking between corresponding entries (fine print at the top or bottom of each entry with links to the same entry on the other two sites); and I still need to pipe all of my old entries through a script (well, probably just a foreach() loop) that'll clone them, appropriately backdated, to GJ and IJ.

So right now I'm only a fraction of the way there. A particularly visible fraction, I guess.

I'm also thinking that I should consolidate copies of all comments from all three sites into one pile in a completely different place for the convenience of anyone who wants to see all the comments without going to three different URLs, though I'm not sure whether a reader there who wants to add a new comment should just post it there or be redirected to LJ/GJ/IJ. (I'm leaning toward redirecting them and making the consolidation repository read-only, to avoid having to deal with identification/authentication issues myself -- and so that a reply to an LJ comment read there gets posted into the thread on LJ, etc.)

I'm not sure whether to set up RSS feeds between the three LJ-codebase sites or not. While all three accounts are active it seems like a pointless redundancy, but if one account should go *poof* for some reason, having already set up RSS feeds from the other two services on that one would be good.

Er ... so not only am I still building the tools, I'm still figuring out exactly how to approach the problem.

And I haven't even started to deal with how to handle SMS posts from my cell phone. Or voice posts, if I ever decide to use that feature. Maybe a 'cron' job that looks for un-mirrored changes to each journal and clones the new entries as it finds them (with a delay and recheck to make sure it didn't just happen to catch something still in the process of being posted to all three)? Could I pick an interval frequent enough to be useful but seldom enough to not be abusive to any of the three sites?