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.

Kick. Ass.

Technorati may serve its purpose, but I’m thrilled about the new Google Blog Search. You can use the blogurl: option to specify a URL, which means you can easily search your blog or LiveJournal. Every week or two, I go digging through LJ looking for a post I remember making a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, it only goes back to June or so (according to the FAQ) but they’re working on that. I imagine this will come in real handy.

(from LJ Nifty)

Earlier tonight, Ryan commented on literacy in this day and age. I’ve been meaning to address the overreaching “hot damn the Internet’s cool” issue for some time now - particularly how the current state of the Net has affected my every day life - but parts of it keep coming up and demanding their own consideration (see: Flickr, blog-friends, information collection, more Flickr, productivity, high class culture, etc).

At any rate, the ongoing blogsplosion (of course it’s a word) has contributed to the articulation of countless thousands that would have otherwise wasted four years of quality high school English by placing apostrophes before the ’s’ in plural words on fliers (this is one of my prime pet peeves). Were it not for the introduction of LiveJournal into my life three and a half years (and 1,907 posts) ago, my reasons for writing anything longer than a thank-you note would have ended with my last college essay. LiveJournal especially has opened the proverbial floodgate for the proverbial flood of proverbial idiots to spread their proverbial drivel.

Because, let’s face it. Most of the people writing in some kind of online journal are doing it to make their voice louder, to reach a wider audience, and to make themselves feel more important than they are (I know I am, anyway). For every legitimate, decent writer producing new content every day, there are 300 angst-ridden high school kids spouting illegible word-vomit on LiveJournal, and another twenty on the smaller (but notably angsty-er) DeadJournal. The unfortunate truth surrounding both of these sites is that they are largely populated by people whose concept of grammar is heavily influenced by shorthand AOL speak.

I couldn’t be happier that more people have a reason to write on a regular basis, myself included. I enjoy having a reason to write, and there are a lot of blogs out there that I enjoy reading. However, I can’t help but think we may have taken a step backward when we took monkeys off the Shakespeare project and replaced their typewriters with computers.

Also, thanks to Ryan for pointing out that I’m interesting.