As y’all know, I’m a little bit of a geek. Just a little, though. I’m a geeklet. Recently, some questions have been asked of me by my non-geeky, super-cool friends about feeds and syndication on LiveJournal. I figured rather than address it all via e-mails and comments, I’d lay it out here in my blog. I’m helpful that way. Also? I figure if I screw up, someone will come along and point it out in comments. I’m all about a backup plan.
First, let me tell you how I have it set up on this here blog. I use WordPress (duh), and I have a nifty little plug-in from FeedBurner that redirects all the feed links to a central location — my FeedBurner feed. So, even if I change to a layout that has a pre-installed link to my feed, it still gets directed to FeedBurner so that FeedBurner can keep track of my subscribers for me. (If you want to know more about any of this, feel free to ask, but I’ll probably tell you that Googling will offer you more concise explanations.)
Now, moving on to how this works with LiveJournal…I gave LiveJournal my FeedBurner address for this blog, and I created a username for the feed. LiveJournal refers to it as a syndicated account. (I have no access to the administration of the account. I have no control over it at all, other than on the “front end” when I post something to my blog.) LiveJournal gets periodic updates from FeedBurner about new content, and LiveJournal posts that content. By using my FeedBurner feed’s URL to syndicate on LJ, though, I now get the number of LJ users who subscribe as part of my total subscriber numbers.
For those of you who use LiveJournal, there’s no difference in post content — subscribing on the blog or adding stephmsdiva to your f-list results in you seeing the same content, post-wise. (You are, however, missing out on some wicked cool sidebar stuff, headers, etc by not viewing it at www.quirkyblogger.com.) But for those of you who are syndicating your blog to an LJ account…well, be prepared.
Since you don’t have admin access to that account, you’ll have to either subscribe to every entry or check it regularly to see when/if comments are posted. This is something that’s a wee bit time-consuming and a whole lot more trouble than just not syndicating in the first place. However, if you have a large group of LJ friends, syndicating to LJ increases the likelihood of those folks subscribing (and increasing your numbers) since LJrs are notoriously unwilling to venture away from Home Sweet LJ. (I’m not knocking it. God knows I love the LJ, too.)
Anyway, I hope this helped a little. If not, err…just keep that to yourselves. Let me bask in my momentary geekdom, okay?
Tags: blogging · geekery · LiveJournal · WordPressComments
