Day: December 26, 2011

As I wrote earlier this morning, I’m in the process of moving the primary blog over to a WordPress blog, to be located at http://blog.cahighways.org/ . I say “primary”, because it is set up to automatically crosspost any entry to Livejournal, which in turn cross-posts it to Facebook. Facebook is also currently posting the RSS syndication of the Livejournal blog.

Here’s the “oops”. This morning, as part of the blog setup, I asked WordPress to import my blog from Livejournal. Which it did. It then started to automatically cross post the old entries back to Livejournal, where they were then crossposted to Facebook, and RSS fed to Facebook (that is until LJ disconnected Facebook connect for too many posts too fast, and I turned off automatic crossposting until the merge is done).

The net result from this: I overloaded your friendslist on LJ with the duplicate posts, as well as overloading those reading current posts on Facebook. I then had to go and remove all the duplicates, which (of course) meant that in some cases (mostly 2004 and early 2005) I left the duplicate and accidentally deleted the original. I also discovered that the process creates a public crosspost to friends-only posts (which are password protected on the WordPress site).

For those of you creating WordPress sites, a strong lesson to be learned: import before you enable crossposting!

I do welcome comments on how the WordPress blog is emerging. I’ve set things up so you can log into the WordPress blog to leave comments with your LJ, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other IDs (yes, that meant I needed to create a Twitter account). I’ll note that I don’t plan to leave Livejournal, nor to stop reading my friendslist. I’ve got a permanent account, after all :-). It is just that given LJ’s behavior of late, I’d rather have my blog someplace under my control. It also gives my blog greater visibility, and prepares me for the day when I won’t always be able to use semagic.