I’ve started a mirror blog at http://slwhitman.blogspot.com just as an experiment. I’m not sure why. Mainly I hoped to try out Windows Live Writer and its ability to post to two blogs at once. I thought I might post to my MySpace blog at the same time as my Livejournal, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to do that. Perhaps it just doesn’t support MySpace. (

, if you know how to make it do that, let me know!)

 

Hm, that brings up the question of LJ-specific code in a post copied to another blog platform.

Also, though, Blogger has some capabilities LJ doesn’t, such as being able to use a sitemeter to not only track where visitors are, but also how they came to your site, such as Google searches. That takes javascript, which LJ doesn’t allow.

Probably unnecessary, but I’m having fun experimenting. 🙂

 Oh, and a picture from my jaunt with a friend to Ravenna Park this afternoon. We were trying to get some shots for the weekly contest at Photogamer.com. This week the challenge is to go someplace new and take pictures of five things they give you a list of to search out.

I don’t think I”m going to bother to get a Flickr account tonight in time to turn in my shots, mainly because I didn’t quite understand the full meaning of the challenge. For example, for #5, Up, I didn’t realize you were supposed to do a straight up-from-the-ground shot. And I wouldn’t have done it, either, because the ground was pretty muddy. Too
bad I didn’t get a shot of Cindy’s shoes, which showed full evidence of her afternoon at two parks. I did, however, get a shot of Cindy herself.

For “play,” we saw a couple who was throwing a ball to their dog. My lovely new camera has continuous shooting, so “play” is not only me playing with my new camera, but a series of blurry shots of a dog playing with a red ball, behind the cut for the faint of bandwidth:

Oh, and we also saw a shirt that someone seemed to have thrown in a tree. We figured they must have thrown it from the bridge above, because it was reaaaally far up there to have thrown it from below.

This is the bridge they must have thrown it from. See? Pretty far up there.

I do like the drag-and-drop feature of Live Writer, letting me just drag pictures from the folder to the post. I can’t stand having to browse for every single picture. I’ll reserve final judgement until seeing the final product, though, because who knows how it will process the picture upload. Will it only upload the thumbnails for the post, or a larger size that people can click on? How will LJ handle that differently from Blogger?

I saw several other interesting things at the park, including a girl playing with juggling sticks that I couldn’t get a good shot of, and several signs I played with getting interesting angles of, though showing you the pictures will have to wait for a different post, because it’s 11:47 and I still haven’t done laundry yet for the week.

After our walk in the park, Cindy and I went to Literary Night at church, a yearly tradition for about 13 years. I wasn’t going to go, but I’m glad we went, muddy jeans and all. Though the quality can vary widely, there were several pieces that were by degrees funny (on purpose), touching, poetic (and when the poetry is actually poetic at an amateur night, that’s saying something), and narrative. One selection was even a children’s book, by, it turns out, one of the committee members of
the local SCBWI. I’m sure she and I will run into each other again next month at the western Washington SCBWI conference. Small world.

ETA:

Verdict: That sucked. It wouldn’t publish them both at once–I had to switch between the two. Okay, doable, since it saves your text. But then it wouldn’t let me upload the pictures–I had to input a lot of FTP info and such, and hey, might as well use my FTP client for that (though perhaps if I’d uploaded the pictures to my gallery first and then used the links as imgsrc tags, it might have still worked. That’s the plan I have every time, because I want to keep my portfolio up to date, and then I get lazy and just upload straight to LJ). So I didn’t even end up sending the post to the Blogger account. 

Also, it (Live Writer, I mean) won’t directly support LJ tags such as lj user and lj-cut, two codes I use frequently. Not to mention the inability to switch usericons. Perhaps I should have tried to post straight HTML rather than WYSIWIG, but I’ve heard that WYSIWIG is the whole reason people like Live Writer.

Anyway, probably not for me. I think I’ll stick with LJ straight up. I like the interface (though I would love a drag and drop feature for adding pictures!) and it’s less complicated. And I find that I’m just getting adult content invites from MySpace latel
y–ugh. I might try it a few more times just to see if perhaps it might grow on me.