it's Blogger!

[januarygrl021]

so I'm switching over to Blogger, but since many friends use LJ, I plan to post the link to my blog in a LJ entry any time I update that one -- that way it still shows up for LJ friends that I've updated the blog.

new blog is currently on Blogger space, but I may soon move it to somewhere on RIT space -- we'll see... Leave a comment

Comments

An automated option...

[pauley]

...since geeks like ourselves like to, well, be geeky about such things... :)

Blogger appears to have provided your blog with an Atom XML feed here.

LiveJournal supports inbound syndication: users with paid accounts (unfortunately, not me -- I had to have a friend help me set it up) can create a new LJ account corresponding to the feed, which other users can then add to their friends: the entries in the offsite blog are visible on LJ users' friends lists.

You want an example? No problem! I have actually just started a new blog of my own called Digital Brainwaves. With the assistance of my friend Lindsay, Digital Brainwaves is being fed to LJ as digitlbrainwavs.

Any further questions, by all means, message, comment, or otherwise contact me. :)

As an aside, any objection to my adding the new blog to my own roll?

Happy blogging, and happy new year!
-- Pauley

[januarygrl021]

yeah I browsed around Blogger and noticed their options for doing feeds and their suggestions if you want to use RSS. I still don't know enough about RSS yet, but many of my friends in ITSO have gradually been explaining it to me.

That's cool that you have something set up for LJ. I have heard and seen from other MT users that MT gets hacked or spammed fairly easily, and I also know some people that use WordPress. I've heard good things about that as well, so I may look into it down the road.

Thanks for your feedback -- and Happy New Year as well!

[pauley]

Yeah, comment spam is a pretty serious problem. Doing some searching on Saturday, though, I found a pretty neat trick. Technically, it doesn't stop comment spam, but it makes it kinda worthless.

I hacked someone else's WordPress plugin to change any links added to the comment body or the URL entry on the comment form into links that pass through a redirect script. That in and of itself doesn't do much -- the script just send you on your merry way. The trick, though, is that a file called robots.txt in the root directory prevents search bots (like Google's GoogleBot spider) from indexing links that go through the redirect.

Spam all you want folks -- your links don't help your PageRank. :-P

As far as setting up the LJ feed, you can do it at http://www.livejournal.com/syn/ . Free users can only add feeds that someone else has already added; like I mentioned before, to add a new feed and create a new account name for it, you need to be a paid (or better) user.

--

[ultra_boy]

how customizable is the layout? it would be really nice to have better control over my layout.

[januarygrl021]

well Blogger had a bunch of different layouts you could choose from to use yourself (well designed too), but then you can change it all you want through CSS, just like MT and WordPress.