I don’t know if anyone besides Jym has tried the LJ Comment Grabber, but I fixed the comment parsing…sort of. Read the project page for more details. If you are using it, this is definitely an update you want to get.
Interested parties may remember my post about copying LiveJournal comments from a syndicated account to a Movable Type blog. Wes and Bob (I think?) recommended some LJ developer pages, but the closest I could get was retrieving comments from an LJ account for which I’m logged in. Since I was looking to get comments from a syndicated account, there is (as far as I know) no way to do that.
So I spent a few hours this weekend hacking together this monstrosity of PHP to scrape the LJ pages and insert comments into the MT database. You can get the code on the project page. It’s not that good and I wouldn’t even really recommend using it, but you’re welcome to it. If you have any problems, bug fixes, or ideas, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment here.
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.
