Starting a new blog soon which will hitch in to my personal web site. Do I:
Install Movable Type and use the lj-crosspost MT plugin to cross-post to a LiveJournal?
5(62.5%)
Create a PHP script for the web site from scratch, that screen-scrapes every aspect of an existing LiveJournal, and just post to LiveJournal as normal?
0(0.0%)
Do something else?
3(37.5%)
If I do something else, then what?
jc) will remain completely separate from the finished web site. I already have another journal created for the (eventual) purpose of cross-linking.
You did mention "new blog" but then you said "screen-scrapes every aspect of an existing LiveJournal, and just post to LiveJournal as normal" which kind of contradicts that.
The first option involves posting to a locally-operated MovableType blog, and having a plugin do the LiveJournal work.
The second option involves posting to LiveJournal, and screen-scraping the LiveJournal (or parsing RSS output as
And as far as I know, you can embed your journal using a system style such as Generator, or probably also an S2 style such as Opal or whatever you're using now.
So, as Melissa said, if screen-scraping LiveJournal (i.e. essentially mirroring it) is an option, embedding your journal would appear to me to be a superior option that accomplishes the same thing.
You mentioned on your personal web site.
Embedding your LiveJournal wouldn't work for that, since it wouldn't be a new blog, just the old one mirrored in a new place.
However, only the first option was even remotely a new blog (having an MT blog and cross-posting to LiveJournal - you could still put stuff into your LiveJournal that's now on MT). I believe that's what Opal did; I remember seeing entries that had "cloned from B2" on them (i.e. that were also posted to her other blog elsewhere - opal.idle.nu IIRC) and entries that didn't.
The second option basically mirrored your LiveJournal, so I didn't count it as "a new blog". And if you're going to mirror it exactly, well, um, that's pretty much what embedding is for, in my mind.
Does that make more sense?
But why do you want to cross-link? Why not just keep it on your own web site?
I suppose all the mention of LiveJournal confused me since I assumed you wanted to link your website to
Third option, then - if you want to update your new blog mainly on your own web site, why not syndicate the MT (or whatever you go with) blog onto LiveJournal rather than using cross-posting or embedding or whatever?
And now I also see why you talk about using a paid account. A one-time payment of US$ 5 lets you make a style that you can keep using for years on LiveJournal, but you can't use customview.cgi after your paid account expires IIRC, so that's not so useful for embedding that journal. (Only Frames works for free journals IIRC.)
Syn points are the major drawback there. I don't foresee my main blog becoming too popular on LiveJournal, so I don't want to waste free users' quotas like that.
but you can't use customview.cgi after your paid account expires IIRC, so that's not so useful for embedding that journal.
There's always the option of buying a paid account and creating a custom S2 style, with a special view for embedding purposes. That'd still work after the paid time expired, so long as I got the design perfect in the time I had.
All that considered, option one looks like much less hassle.
;)