BrockLi Soup

LiveJournal can handle RSS/Atom feeds pretty much the same way it handles any other user or community: if someone creates a syndicated account for a feed, users can “friend” it and comment on posts there. This is convenient for people who already use LJ and want easy access to a couple site feeds (I don’t think it would be usable as a full-fledged newsreader, but I guess it depends on how many and what types of blogs).

As of this writing, 44 people read this blog via it’s syndicated account (wave!). It’s not a lot of people, but my readership is pretty low, so that probably accounts for most of my audience. Since the account acts like any other friend, these people see my posts smack in the middle of their friends page, and thus, can easily comment on posts there.

And people do, a lot more than they comment here. This is great, except for the fact that it’s on LJ. As far as I can tell, they list the most recent 15 posts there, but don’t give you any way to go further back. Unless you bookmark the post itself, there’s no way to see old comments (and that’s assuming that the pages don’t go away, too).

Much earlier this year, JR suggested that I write a script to import comments from LiveJournal into Movable Type. I’ve started looking into it at least three times, but keep getting discouraged. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to get those comments - no RSS feed or API that I’ve found - so I’m going to have to screen scrape them. I keep putting it off because it’s going to be a pain in the ass and while I really want to pull in those comments, I also really want to not deal with regular expressions.

So, to the LJ and MT hackers out there (if there are any): have you ever seen a plugin that does this, or even an LJ data source that would make it easier? I’ve looked around and come up empty, but since it’s going to be at least another month before I really feel like dealing with it on my own, I figured I’d ask around.

Tags: comments, livejournal, lj, movabletype, mt

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.