The Diary of A Simple Man

Crossposting to LJ from Dreamwidth hasn't been working for a while for me, apparently. It seems that my password was incorrect. I've updated it, so this is a test to see if it works now.

I assume that everyone has heard about the new terms of service for LJ? They seem to have finally gone over the line, both in their anti-LGBTQ attitudes and their apparent assertion of their right to unlimited reuse even of private posts by users.

I'm bobquasit over on Dreamwidth, too. Can I get an idea of who's staying here, and who's going? I don't have many (any?) friends on Dreamwidth, and I'd like to rectify that. I'm not planning to delete my account here (not yet, anyway), but I'm probably going to be posting over there rather than over here. I'm not at all comfortable with the Russian Duma (or anyone) looking over my private posts and judging whether what I write is acceptable.

I've worked out a way to automatically cross-post to Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal from Google Plus. This allows me to make ONE post to Google Plus, and have it go automatically to almost all of my other social media. You can throw in LinkedIn as well, incidentally; I didn't mention it initially because I don't use it.

The only thing that's left out of the mix is, sadly, Dreamwidth.

Anyway, here's how it's done:

1. You'll need a Google Plus account.
2. Set up a Friends+Me account. Their site is at http://www.friendsplus.me/ . The accounts are free.
3. On Friends+Me, link your Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn accounts to your Google Plus account. You can also link Google Pages (i.e. communities) to other accounts, apparently.
4. When you post publicly to Google Plus, include a hashtag in your post. Hashtag t (i.e. #t) reposts it to Twitter, f reposts it to Facebook, l (that is, "L") reposts it to LinkedIn. You can combine them in any order, so #flt would repost to all three.
5. If your LiveJournal is set up to aggregate and repost your Tweets, all G+ posts which were reposted to Twitter will appear in your daily 12pm Twitter aggregation on LiveJournal.

It's that easy! Once you've set it up, all you have to do is include the proper hashtags in your public G+ posts. There's nothing else to do.
The drawbacks:

1. Your LJ reposts are in the form of Tweets, i.e. a collection of one-liners. However, they each come with a link to the full-length original on G+.
2. Formatting doesn't carry over.
3. The LJ reposts are done at 12pm. They are, therefore, not timely.
4. Dreamwidth can't get the posts at all, as far as I can figure.
5. There is no way to commingle comments and responses that you receive to the various copies on different social media.

All that said, it's still a huge improvement!

Almost forgot: you could, in fact, re-import your LiveJournal into Dreamwidth, assuming that you have both. However, as far as I can tell there is no way to automate this, so you'd have to actually go and DO it every so often. I'm also not entirely sanguine about re-importing. Dreamwidth says it won't duplicate posts, but it's apparently a big process that Dreamwidth "schedules", so doing it on a daily basis is probably not a good thing for DW.

Just to be clear, once you've set things up the chain of reposting is:

G+ > Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn
Twitter > LiveJournal

Hi! Over 75% of the posts on this journal are viewable by friends only. If you'd like to be added to that list, please let me know; you can comment here if you like.

Just a note to remind readers that the vast majority of posts here from now on will be friends-only. If you're not a nut or a stalker and want to be added to my flist, drop me a line or comment here.

From this point forward, most of my entries will be friends-only. So if you're not a pyscho or a stalker, and would like to be added to my friends list, drop me a line.

I wrote six reviews on Yelp of places that we went to in Boothbay. I'm going to post copies of those reviews here. Is this going to be a problem for anyone? Should I make them private, or post them behind an opt-in filter, or something like that?

Sixteen of my last twenty posts are private, viewable only by me. I've discovered that I write far more, and far more freely, when I know that nobody but me (and maybe someday Sebastian) will read what I write. That's quite interesting and unexpected.

The down-side is of course that nobody can read or comment on those posts, but that's a relatively rare occurrance anyway.

I'm actually very surprised at how much more I'm writing now. I even started a new poem this morning! I considered making the whole journal private, but that seems excessive. I'll just play it by ear and see if I can work out some sort of balance between private and non-private posts, I guess. 75% private is probably a little excessive.

It would be interesting to generate some numbers showing the ratio of private, friends-only, filtered, and public posts in a journal. I wonder if there's an online tool that can do that? Or I could just add it all up by hand. But that would be tedious.

http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=981246

I've noticed a problem viewing old posts using tags. For example, I have a tag for posts about my son (http://bobquasit.livejournal.com/tag/sebastian). These date back to 2003. But when I'm viewing them and try to go back ("Previous 20 entries") past http://bobquasit.livejournal.com/?skip=380&tag=sebastian (which is March 2005), I end up at a single entry for March 2, 2005 - and there is no "Previous 20 entries" link.

The same thing happens when I just try to view old posts in aggregate, rather than individually. It's impossible to "skip" more than 380 posts. Is this how it should be?

Since the tone of politics seems to be changing in the USA, and since my political posts are likely to become less popular (or more annoying; your pick) under the new regime, most or quite possibly all of my political posts going forward will be made under my Politics filter. It seems a bit strange that I am feeling forced to climb inside a virtual bunker under these circumstances, but I can't deny the reality of what is going on; dissent is clearly going to be far less "acceptable" from now on. I don't want to have to worry about being flamed or having flist issues every time I make a political post, so I'm going under the filter.

This will eliminate my future political posts from search engines and the public view. Yes, this bothers me. No, I don't see a practical alternative.

If you want to be on the Politics filter, let me know. Unlike most of my other filters, however, I will not be automatically adding anyone who asks to be on it. Sorry, but if I feel that I'll have to worry about pissing you off, that would defeat the purpose of the filter in the first place.

Twelve or thirteen people are currently on that filter, by the way. I'll probably do a post on it later today; if you see it, you're in the filter.