Follow-up to that last post on LJ usage (in lieu of individual responses)

[hrj]

What the LJ statistics page says on the unique LJ views stat is: "This figure shows all viewers who were logged in to LiveJournal when they viewed your journal or your entries via their own Friends pages. Here, unique is defined by the visitor’s LiveJournal username." That's as much as I know about it.

To answer other concerns: No, I am absolutely not considering moving my substantive blogging to facebook. I have very deliberately kept my facebook wall private to friends-only (and I have some rather tight criteria for who I friend on facebook) which would not be compatible with doing public blogging there. (I do post links to my LJ regularly on both my facebook wall and my public author page because I know there are people over there who don't have LJ accounts.) And as several people pointed out, it' absurd to even consider doing substantive blogging on Twitter.

What I am thinking about doing is setting up a blog on my alpennia.com website (which is rather content-poor currently) to help drive traffic there, particularly since so much of my blogging is writing-related these days. It would definitely have to be using an interface that allowed easy commenting and no "must have this particular social media account to comment." Bonus for easy mirroring (or at least breadcrumb-trail-leaving) on LJ and Dreamwidth. (Did you know I have a Dreamwidth account? Of course not, because I never use it because it's too much work to dual-post.) The main reason for moving would be to integrate my writing website with my blogging as a "branding" thing.

Nothing will happen in the immediate future. Just considering options and looking at up and down sides.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I never use it because it's too much work to dual-post

Hunh. I post in DW, and it cross-posts automatically to LJ. There have been very rare occasions when that hasn't happened for some technical reason beyond my ken, but it's been 99% reliable and not required a moment's thought or action from me since I set it up (which was tick-one-box-and-type-the-LJ-URL easy).

[mariedeblois.livejournal.com]

This is what I was going to say.

For the blog on alpennia.com, I'll recommend WordPress as a general thing. Many hosting companies have it as a one-click install and it's pretty straightforward to configure and post with and you can set it up so that no special accounts are needed to comment (though you may want to install Aksimet as a spam filter on the comments if you do open commenting).

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Problem is, I've never really "gone native" in Dreamwidth. I set up an account during one of those "OMH LJ is going to explode and go away" times and friended some people who don't do LJ any more, but I rarely even visit it. So do what you do would require two changes: switch to primary posting in DW and then set up a feed to LJ.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup. This is exactly what I did. I opened a DW account during one of those LJ-panic moments. and then realised that so few of my friends were going over I did still want to have my posts seen in LJ; and discovered fairly quickly that there was no way I was going to read friends lists in both LJ and DW, especially when so many posts were duplicated on both; but I was attracted by the notion of a back-up/fallback copy of my journal; so I post in DW with the automatic cross-posting, and I read in LJ. It took two minutes to set up, and that's all I have to remember: post there, read here. You set up the LJ feed once and never have to think about it again.

[julesjones]

Exactly how and why I have a DW account. And why many of the people I read daily have a DW account, but read via LJ. It's easy and it's a useful backup Just In Case. (Also tends to suffer less from DoS attacks during Russian political events.)

[mariedeblois.livejournal.com]

Yep, exactly how I do mine. I do read on DW, but mostly what's there is feeds for comics and suchlike (such as Captain Awkward).

[zeborah]

Most of my friends have actually made the move to DW. I post to DW, and to read I open tabs in DW, LJ, and my RSS reader (Inoreader, which replicates all the Google Reader functionality I cared about). As my LJ friends shift to DW I add them there and remove them here (I rarely f-lock things so this has little impact) and these days I find only a couple of items a day in my LJ friends' list.

This said, there are 9 and 60 ways and all that. The Wordpress > DW > LJ route seems like a workable one, since it'd let me shift to reading in DW, and even if it was just Wordpress I could just add it to Inoreader. (If you do do that though, don't try to abbreviate the feed to just syndicate a teaser. If I can't get the full post in my feedreader, chances of me bothering to follow the link no matter how brilliant it is rapidly approach null on a busy day, and most days are busy.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

This is a reasonable idea. As long as I get the heads-up about the beginning of the change so I can get my rss feed set up.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The least problematic crossposting setup seems to be posting from WP to DW (there is at least one plugin that lets you add at least some icons) and let DW crosspost to LJ (every now and again, LJ makes trouble, but during those times posting directly usually does not work, either.)

My willingness to post to WP has increased mightily with the acquisition of a Desktop client, MacJournal. It has some quirks (does not correctly handle URLs and image tags, so you always need a little cleanup) but it makes it a lot easier to compose a post, let it sit for a while, tweak it, and then send it out, as opposed to needing to dig through the WP interface to post.

Your book review and History month posts sound like good content for the Wordpress blog; whether you also want 'this grows in my garden' posts there (or whether you keep them to DW/LJ) is up to you.