Jo Charman has created a LiveJournal
‘syndication account’ for me. As a result you can
see my RSS feed, converted in to a LiveJournal
journal. She says that if you have a paid-for LiveJournal
account, you can add pdc to your
friends roster. And people can comment on the
LiveJournal pointers to my posts. Woohoo.
Updated (4 March 2007). Updated URL. Corrected the spelling of Jo’s first name.
I have been scraping the syndicated version of my RSS feed on LiveJournal in order to add comments links to my articles (not that anyone does). They recently changed the format, so that (a) readers must click through to a second LJ page to find the link to click read the post itself, and (b) my scraper broke. But that’s their perogative, and offering a comment service to strangers who aren’t even LiveJournal members is hardly part of their core mission, so I cannot fault them for it!
They have also switched to using ‘cool’
URLs (in the
sense described by Tim Berners-Lee
in his Style
Guide to Online Hypertext) of the form
~pdc/1234.html rather than
talkread.bml?this=that&thother=1234. Apart from
making the URLs shorter, this change means that the mechanism
used to serve the files is now invisible, and can be altered
without having to change the URLs in future. It could even be
(gasp!) static files generated once a night when they scan
my RSS feed.
Yesterday the server hosting our Picky Picky Game suffered a hardware failure, and for some reason we have lost all additions to the object database since it went live. After discussion on LiveJournal, enough people found pictures cached in their web browsers that I have been able to reconstruct an archive of the completed panels (with only a couple of lacunae), and so we plan to start the game afresh, with the output of the previous game inserted as Page 0 of its archive. Read more