Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

archer904 maintains this list of LiveJournal blogs and feeds of writers, editors, and other publishing professionals. These people blog about their daily stuff - writing, editing, verifying, proofreading and publishing. One can read excerpts from yet unpublished works and get hints on how to improve own writing.

As I have already mentioned before, my mother is very interested in blogging. She is about to start blogging herself. I am helping her to find the proper tool and get used to the idea. I think it is important to remind here that she is not by any means an advanced computer user.

Features that she needs:

• Web interface. As easy as possible.
• Few security levels for posts. She needs to be able to write public articles (viewable by everyone), “friends”-only articles (viewable by a number of people selected by her), and private articles (viewable only by her).
• Categories for posts. She needs to create several categories for her posts, similar to the way I have it.
• Searching. Searching for posts that she wrote previously is an absolute must.
• Comment control. She must be able to switch comments on and off and to limit comments to “friends”-only.
• Image galleries. She wants to post images from her travelling and day-to-day life. Organization of images, annotations, and comments are all considered and advantage.
• Favourite links on the main page. She wants to maintain a number of links to her favourite sites and other blogs (like mine) on the main page. In other words: blogroll.
• Free. She is not yet totally convinced that she wants to blog, thus paying any money for this functionality is not an issue.

After talking to her for a couple of hours yesterday, I realized that she sees my blog as an ideal example. I would have, of course, installed a copy of Nucleus CMS for her on my server, but I am not so sure about the user friendlyness of it. I mean I can easily modify HTML and PHP code as needed for my blog. This is not an option with my mom.

So far I have inspected the following web services:

• LiveJournal.com
• Blogger aka BlogSpot.com
• Journals.Ru
• Blog Drive
• Blog.com

None of the above services fully satisfy the requirements. Out of all these, Blog.com has most of the features. It has an a very easy to use interface, themable blogs, multiple blogs per one account, categories for posts, image hosting and photo albums, comments control and much more. It even offers easy blogrolling, linking, syndication, and book lists. Surprisingly, the service is free. There are a few limitations though:

• Disk space. Free account is limited to 10 MBytes. This is more than enough for any beginner who plans on writing text only. With photo albums and image hosting functionality it is pretty easy to run out of though.
• Bandwidth. Free account is limited to 250 MBytes per month. Again, this is more than enough for a blogging newbie, but can be ran out of easily with lots of images or mild popularity.
• Advertising. Free accounts will have a mandatory, but small Google Adsense advertising. I don’t see it as a big problem. This is much nicer than banner ad programs that websites used to have long time ago.
• Minor functionality limitations. Few features are not available with the free account. Most noticably, access statistics are locked, so you won’t be able to see who comes to your blog, from where they come, and what do they want. Also, private blogs (limited to the owner or selected group of people) are also not available.

I personally see these limitations as minor ones. Most people use web services which don’t even offer half the features Blog.com does, so few cut offs are an OK in my book. In case there is a need for more disk space or bandwidth, or if those limited features are all you need, Blog.com offers a really nice pricing scheme.

LiveJournal has succeded in building a very large community. Lots and lots of blogs are started every minute at LJ and lots and lots of these blogs get updated every minute. Reading through these might be a very time consuming and pretty boring process though. Just to get an idea of how different are LJ users and their interests consider checking the last 30 pictures posted to LiveJournal. Every time you refresh that page, you get a different set. This a really cool time and bandwidth killer…

With this script I will terrorize my friends from today onwards. What it does is get all the recent posts from some LiveJournal blog and email them as separate messages to a list of recepients. Subject of the blog entry is used as a subject of the email. Body of the message contains of text and the permalink.

In order to use, first configure few simple variables at the beginning of the script, providing LJ credentials, list of recepients, address to use in the From: field and a file to keep the timestamp of the last syncronization.

Changes: in this version I have fixed encoding fo the body and subject. Body can now be recoded with Text::Iconv module to any encoding from the default UTF-8. Subjects are additionally fixed to be base64-encoded.

lj2mail.pl

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Some time ago I have registered at LiveJournal.com. Originally, I did it to be able to search for blogs by region. It turned out that this feature was available only to paid accounts. I thought that I won’t be needing this account anymore.

After some time I found myself posting comments to different LJ blogs using my account. But I was getting warning that my account is about to be deleted due to inactivity.

Today I got an interesting idea. I am getting emails from some mailing lists with jokes and funny stories. I usually forward the best ones to few friends of mine via email. Instead, I will post them in my LJ blog and will do the forwarding from there using RSS feed and a simple Perl script.

This way, I will be able to maintain my LJ account and share the funny stuff with more people, while doing less. Long live Perl and RSS!