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

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

That is a very nice client, indeed... thanks for the tip...

Re: Bailing on my own LJ client

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been using Semagic (Windows) for a while now and it's pretty good... I've also been using XJournal (OS X) and it's fine too. I'd love to see your LJ client though, if you want to share it!

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.