Kink meme posts were making the script take forever (sooooo many comments) so I updated the code to be faster. Get the new version here: LJ/DW Title Rewriter.

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!