queenbarwench | Moving to IJ for Dummies (Reply)

As promised for several weeks, "Moving to IJ for Dummies", your guide to mirroring and cross-posting, including a few points about Semagic that you really need to know.

Mirroring your journal:

Go here for a comprehensive guide to mirroring your LJ using LJ-sec (Method 2). I went straight for the "Bold" method and it worked fine, but I believe people have had problems moving particularly large journals.

Please note, this method will not take along tags, comments, memories or icons. There are various methods here for getting icons and memories off LJ. If you upload icons to your new home with the same keywords, cross-posting will find them quite happily.

Cross-posting:

Download and install Semagic. Don't forget to download and install a dictionary to go with it.

To set up for multiple journals (source):

In the login box put a "username" and password. (Your "username" can be anything you want to identify the account, ie: fic ij, fic lj, real life.)

DO NOT LOG IN!

Tick the "remember password" box and the "auto-login" box.

Now click on File >> Server Settings.

Put your REAL username in the box here.

Make sure the server is www.[whichever]journal.com, ie: live for LJ, insane for IJ etc. JF is www.journalfen.net.

Click OK, and then log in.

Log out and do it again for the next journal.

Important note for those posting to InsaneJournal:
Switch to your IJ account in Semagic. Are the "Tags" and "Location" boxes displayed? If they are not, any cross-posts you make will not carry across the tag and location information to IJ.

To fix (source):

Exit Semagic completely.

Go to Start >> Run

Type regedit

Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\alex semenov\livejournalU\user_[your username]\

Look for the value TagListEnabled and double-click on it.

Change the value from 0 to 1 and close.

Do the same for the value LocationEnabled

Close Regedit and restart Semagic.

Do NOT, under any circumstances, be messing with any other entries in your registry. If you don't know what you're doing, you could fubar your computer.

Now you can begin cross-posting. Type your entry out as usual, then go to Journal >> Post to multiple journals and pick the ones you want. Unfortunately, you can't make this the default behaviour so you have to do this each time you post. You also can't edit posts across journals; you have to edit each one individually. Tis an inconvenience, but a minor one.

And that's the essentials sorted. Now you just have to go through your journal at your new home and re-tag *yawn* and find a layout that you like. I recommend using Bloggish and having a hunt through its themes. If you have a paid account (for IJ) you can create your own layers or nab them from here. There's also details here on how to replicate a 3-column layout on IJ.

Final things to do are:

Finding all your friends again (the quick way)

telling people where you've gone. This comm is also useful for finding friends who have different usernames on different journals.

Setting up RSS feeds if you only plan on checking one flist. This is something you can only do with a paid account at IJ :( but you can set up with Google reader or feedreader if you choose. I suspect Bloglines will do much the same job too.