Comments | dglenn: Whoops (Cross-Blog Side Effects)

dglenn

Whoops (Cross-Blog Side Effects)

Jun 12, 2007 16:08

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 ( Read more... )

tech, meta, questions

Comments 14

(The comment has been removed)

dglenn June 12 2007, 20:16:17 UTC

Uh ... you're welcome, I guess ... ;-)

Testing ext_50474 June 12 2007, 20:15:20 UTC

Checking how sites interact via OpenID.

Re: Testing cellio June 13 2007, 00:48:46 UTC

How'd you do that? Does it work with GJ? (I know you can't post comments to GJ from LJ using OpenID; I asked during the recent LJ troubles. I'd never heard of IJ before this post.)

I know you've solved this now, but just as one datum: when I see an LJ name in a post and am curious, it's the profile and not the recent entries I click on. I want to see the overview before diving into the journal, and, well, there are a lot of unreadably-formatted journals out there anyway.

Re: Testing dglenn June 13 2007, 10:42:00 UTC

I clicked the OpenID button on the post-comment form, and typed my IJ address (http://dglenn.insanejournal.com) into the box that popped up. Since I was already logged into IJ at the time, I got a screen asking permission to forward my credentials to LJ.

Going the other direction, I'd randomly gotten logged out from LJ at the time I tried to post a comment to IJ as my LJ self, so I got a "you need to be logged in" page -- I logged in in another tab, refreshed the first tab, and from there things worked the same as they had in the first experiment.

I hadn't thought to try doing the same thing with GJ, and hadn't heard that GJ doesn't support OpenID. :-( Sure enough, there's no OpenID button on the GJ comment form. That will definitely be a problem if it comes to folks who stay on LJ wanting to comment to folks who move to GJ. Ouch. And the impression that I've gotten from reading a lot of comments during the peak of the Strikethrough2007 discussion, is that a lot ( ... )

Re: Testing dglenn June 13 2007, 11:30:02 UTC

"when I see an LJ name in a post and am curious, it's the profile and not the recent entries I click on"

Yah, more often than not, I do that too (and I share your pain regarding unreadably-formatted journals). I wasn't sure how many other people did the same thing.

Okay, I'm definitely keeping the profile link thingie. The other question is whether the pop-up box that has "Add friend / View profile / View journal" when you hover over the icon ... is useful, is mostly ignored, or is annoying as hell to most people. I'm leaning toward just not bothering to preserve that feature, both for the sake of simplicity and because I find it gets in my way most of the time. (If I've got the mouse on the icon, it's because I'm about to click it to view the profile; if I want to read the journal, I'll just click on the name, and I'm not going to add them as a friend without peeking at the profile and usually their recent entries first. But do most people like it?)

marnanel June 12 2007, 20:25:35 UTC

Don't use

dglenn June 12 2007, 20:54:55 UTC

Yah, I'm leaning that way. I'm going to have to translate/expand every place it shows up in my old entries when I clone them to the new journals.

If I leave off the little link-to-profile symbol, it'll be faster to just type the HREFs by hand; if I do include that, I'll want to make a macro for vi -- I think that's right about where the hassle/convenience boundary is for me.

I'm guessing that the pop-up "add friend|view profile|view journal" box is code embedded in the style referenced in the tag that the &lj;user> tags expand to; I'll probably just throw that out unless it turns out that a lot of other people find it especially useful.

marnanel June 12 2007, 21:06:16 UTC

Don't you use some kind of client to post to multiple sites? So just make it translate lj-user!

dglenn June 12 2007, 21:38:17 UTC

Doh! Yah, I use clive. I could hack it to do the expansion. (Then again, "add a tags command-line option to clive" has been on my to-do list for a really long time; I might get around to writing a wrapper that expands user before invoking clive more quickly.)

Can I just blame this oversight on the general brain-friedness I complained about earlier?

madbodger June 13 2007, 02:07:09 UTC

I wouldn't bother with HTML or any of the site-specific mutant HTMLs, I'd just code
the entries in XML and have stylesheets to whack it into all the target dialects.

dglenn June 13 2007, 11:19:41 UTC

The one big advantage to site-specific mutant HTML is the automagic fixup when a target renames hir journal. Going to XML ... I'd have to get around to learning enough XML to understand how much work it'd be to learn how to do that (right now I get the general gist of XML but not how to write DTDs and how to use stylesheets to whack it into HTML as needed -- so far I've done all my "turn XML into HTML" using 'sed'). Got a good really-quick-intro web site to suggest that isn't "magazine article 'wow golly lookitthat'" shallow (i.e. overview but still enough detail to get me started)?

If I were using (writing) a GUI client, it would make even more sense to have the front-end tool create XML as an intermediate product. But I've been writing my entries in HTML by hand in 'vi', and I'm comfortable with that, and I get the impression that (in general) XML is more useful as a language for two programs to use share data with each other, than as something humans type. Am I wrong about that? (Admittedly, my impression is gleaned partly by ( ... )

madbodger June 13 2007, 15:03:44 UTC

Actually, I find the level of effort for XML about equivalent to HTML for the sorts of things
I do with it (probably similar to the things you do). The more I tweak and customize the
HTML, the better XML looks, as I can apply the tweaks automatically and uniformly by
simply reprocessing the XML originals (I edit mine with vi for the most part).

However, transforming XML with stylesheets can quickly get into deep magic if you
want to get creative (which I'll take as a given). Personally, I have a great deal of
fun making stylesheets do intricate things (e.g. stylesheets generating stylesheets,
stylesheets transforming XML into troff), but "normal" people try to avoid such things.
I even have stylesheets that take parameters from the command line, do I18N on the
fly, and call Java for various tasks.

vvalkyri June 13 2007, 05:49:20 UTC

how are you going about mirroring?

dglenn June 13 2007, 11:08:25 UTC

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 ( ... )