jc

I vote for "Embed your journal into a website".

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.

I don't understand that interpretation. Could you explain it in greater detail?

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 csogilvie suggested) to reproduce the entries on my web site. I won't have enough control of the layout on LJ's end unless I buy a paid account or learn enough PHP.

I don't understand how that's possible without creating a custom style.

Er, so create a custom style? You do have a paid account last I checked.

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.

I don't understand that interpretation. Could you explain it in greater detail?

You mentioned Starting a new blog soon 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?

Oh, and I hadn't read this bit:

Just to be perfectly clear, this journal (jc) will remain completely separate from the finished web site. I already have another journal created for the (eventual) purpose of cross-linking.

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 jc, not a new LiveJournal user account.

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.)

But why do you want to cross-link? Why not just keep it 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?

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. ;)

b2 is php-based and allows simultaneous posting to the b2 blog and LJ - I used that before I came to college. You're a lot more techie than I though, so if that didn't work or was too simple, you could probably still come up with something cool. =P