Putting your newsletter on DW *and* LJ - best practice?

[murklins]

In the last post, people came forward to say yes, they will cross-post to DW, or have started already. Fabulous! I applaud the migration of fannish content to DW. And now I would love to hear people's thoughts on the best ways of actually doing that, and the advantages/disadvantages of various methods.

The methods as I see them:

1. Post to LJ, create a syn account of the LJ RSS feed on DW
2. Post to DW, create a syn account of the DW RSS feed on LJ
3. Post on both DW and LJ (actual cross-posting)

Posting on DW offers what seems like only a small advantage but to newsletters can be hugely important: a really easy way to make links to user names on all kinds of different sites. The <user name=murklins site=livejournal.com> style of tags is amazing and can immediately make it clear on a newsletter who is making a post and where that post is located. Unfortunately, they only work on DW, so to cross-post an entry coded with those user tags, you need to either use the DW cross-poster which maps the DW-specific tags to LJ-friendly code for you or you need to do that mapping *yourself* somehow. ICK. (Or, I suppose, you could be content with a newsletter that looks great and links properly on one site but looks/links less well on other sites you cross-post to.)

Unfortunately, the DW cross-posting functionality only works for personal journals right now, not comms. Argh! you say. (Well, I say.) If you are desperate, though, you can still harness the DW crossposter to convert DW user tags to code LJ recognizes. It is just really clumsy. You need two personal journal accounts, one on DW and one on LJ, to make it work.

• Make sure that the DW personal account is set up to be able to crosspost to an LJ personal account.
• Make a post that uses DW user tags and put it into a DW post. Set it up to post to the personal account, not a comm, because that disables the DW crosspost stuff. Enable it to crosspost to the LJ personal account.
• C&P the DW personal post into yet another DW entry and post this one to your DW newsletter comm.
• Go to LJ and find the crossposted entry -- C&P it into a new entry and post it to the LJ newsletter comm.
• Done!

The syndicated feed methods have their own issues, too. For example, feed accounts on LJ and DW allow comments to be posted to them, and you cannot turn them off. This means people probably will comment on the feed posts. Not necessarily a bad thing, except you can't automatically get comment notifications on those feeds. For example, this xkcd feed post has a few comments on it, but unless the XKCD guy comes to check on his DW feed, he has no way of knowing they're there. Nor is there a tracking mechanism that allows you to select "notify me of all comments made to any posts in this account." Instead, if you want to be notified of comments on feed accounts, you need to first track all the posts made in that account, and then once you are aware a new post exists you can choose to track all comments made on that specific post. Hassle! If people are used to commenting on your newsletter posts to tell you about links or make corrections, they will probably comment on your feed's posts thinking that you will be notified of those comments. Unless you are diligently watching your feed account, you may end up missing a lot of comments.

I think I've babbled enough. Please jump in and share your thoughts!

Comments

[hermitsoul]

Right now I'm prepping them both in a client, then I post them individually to LJ, IJ and DW. It takes a minute or two to log out, reload the saved file and repost to the next journal, but in the end it's not a big deal. I'm glad my TS newsletter doesn't use the user icons - no need to mess around with coding at all. I'm half tempted to do away with the user icons on the Sports Night one as well - less fuss all around.

It is a pain editing errors on all three posts though. Open, fix, save, open next post, fix, save . . . better to get it right in the first place!

[murklins]

Yeah, see, I love the user icons -- I think they really help with readablity. But I loathe the very idea of crossposting them to three, or even two, sites. The only place user icons make sense to me is on DW itself, and possibly on posts magically DW-crossposted elsewhere, because corrections to the DW post will propagate to the offsite posts without manual intervention. That way you only ever deal with the elegant user tags, not the horror that is the html that imitates a user tag.

But yeah, manual crossposting in general is a pain when it comes to fixing mistakes. And if you run a delicious-backed newsletter, you also have to fix things on Del. Grrrr.

[Do you want me to tweak your SN script to remove the icons and make it more like your TS script?]

[hermitsoul]

Once upon a time I liked the user icons. Then I had to actually code the fake user icons. *shudders* DW makes things so simple - why can't the other sites fall into line?

I would love, love, love it if you helped tweak the SN script - I've been staring at it with some trepidation. No pressure though, the fandom isn't really active right now and I'm only posting twice a month.

[murklins]

The other sites don't care about us! Oh, the bitter truth.

Send me the SN script, and also the TS one so I can copy off my old code. Probably won't take me long at all. I hope. :)

[hermitsoul]

Sent - and thank you!

Newslettering

[cesy]

I think that a couple of these are common problems and should go in suggestions over here. For instance, DW could implement a feature to allow you to "track all comments on this syndicated feed", or even allow the person who sets up/owns a syndicated feed to say "disable comments on this syndicated feed" which would be a good workaround until they implement proper fixes for feeds to send comments to the right place.

Re: Newslettering

[murklins]

The comment disabling is planned: http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471

And in a nice, automatic way, so that feeds that indicate commenting is available on the originating site will automatically display in DW with comments disabled.

I guess my REAL issue, though, is with LJ, since no matter how awesome DW is, feeds on LJ allow comments and I am sick of fighting for change over there, having never once had a good experience with the suggestions process.

[msilverstar]

This is good and useful thinking, thank you, please do go on.

[murklins]

Hee, thanks! Probably I will, since I now have an entire community for exactly this kind of rambling. :)

[mamoru]

So yeah, we've been using the third method you've mentioned above for the bbc_merlin_news Newsletter and its working great. It is a bit more effort because you'll need to post three times but with the help of something like semagic it is fairly easy.

We ran into the problem that some of our editors don't really want a dreamwidth account but we've just given full access to our reading journal which they can use to post.

I do have to say that dreamwidth is great about the crossposting, but if we could actually crosspost on communities it would make life a lot easier.

And not just for newsletters but also for any other comms. Oh well, there is still hope we'll get it one day. *g*

[murklins]

Crossposting to comms is possible since the LJ API includes a way to specify which journal to post *to*, not just which journal to post *with*. I figure it's more a matter of making the DW interface support it, plus maybe a way to limit how many comms you can crosspost to, exactly. Also, you know, priorities.

Anyway, don't lose hope. I think it might come eventually! :)

[msilverstar]

yayyyy!!!

Fandom people really need this feature so we can hold on to our community comfort zones.