Bailing on my own LJ client

[mbarrick]

Well, after using it for three years I think I am going to abandon my personal home-made LJ client. I have other things I'd rather spend time on and Semagic now has almost all the features that I have grown used to in my own client. The only one that is missing (the automatic inclusion of a 1x1 GIF with a time stamp for the sake of logging hits against my entries) is pretty much reproducible with a macro (I just have to type the time information in manually rather than have it filled in automatically - not a big deal). All in all, it has come a long way since the last time I tried it and it pretty much renders any further development of my client moot.

Comments

Re: Bailing on my own LJ client

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

It's a Lotus Notes application - I made it when I was working at HSBC so it would look like I was working while I used it ;-)

This problem that killed it for me was I wrote it in a hurry to get around a specific problem (not leaving a footprint in their proxy logs) and didn't spend *any* time actually adhereing to the proper LJ protocol (mostly because I wrote it at work, and couldn't read LJ to read the protocol documents). My username/password, friends groups, pictures, etc. were all just hard-coded in and I would just ammend the code when I made a change. It was never pretty, but I built in lots of options for blocks of HTML I re-use a lot and 1x1 gif thing, and I quick and easy way to repost the same post to Deadjournal as well. All of that is pretty trivial, really, from a coding perspective. It was a kludge I kept adding more kludges to for three years.In
it's orginal incarnation it fit on a floppy that I could sneaker-net to work, use offline, and take back home to post.

When they switched to the new authentication scheme to get around cross-site scripting security problems it broke it big-time. I started re-wrting it to use the proper protocols and then realised that it wasn't worth the effort given how far the other clients had come along.

I have Clive on my Linux box as well... I can SSH in and update from the command prompt. I'm also thinking of using it to back-end a mail-to-post gatewar Domino server that's more fully-featured than the one that LJ offers to facilitate posting from my Blackberry when I am out of town.