I’m doing the “happy Snoopy” dance! I have been hand-copying my blog posts from Movable Type to LiveJournal for more than three years now. Every time I posted to MT, I would then copy the entry text and go to the “update journal” page on LJ and paste it in, choosing my userpic by hand, etc. I have tried various automated methods - for I while I was looking for a Windows client that could post to both MT and LJ so I could minimize the number of clicks necessary - it would still involve me doing two updates, but I wouldn’t be copying and pasting because it wouldn’t be web-based. That never worked, and neither did the LJPost plugin for MT. But with WordPress, I can automatically post to LiveJournal thanks to a spiffy plugin called LivePress. I had some problems installing it, and as I read through the 100+ comments I found various fixes for making it work with WP 1.5 and so on. And then I found the fixed-up version of LivePress which works with 1.5.1.3 (the latest WP, and what I’m using now) and is itself a minor tweak of this version of LivePress.

What really makes LivePress so jaw-droppingly superb is its support for all the little tweaks of LiveJournal. You can choose your userpic, music, mood, and security level right in the WP “Write Post” screen. You can even post directly to any community that you have rights to post to from LiveJournal. I’m not 100% sure yet, but I think you might even be able to edit an entry in WP and have LivePress automatically update the corresponding LJ entry. I am so excited by this plugin!

Added: Well, of course it’s too good to be true. I thought this post had synced properly but now I don’t see it. I’m also having a really bizarre error with the main page of my Cherry Blossom Time theme - it seems to be using CSS from www.amanita.net! The bunnies and white links of my www pages are showing up…but only on the main page and not in the individual pages! Weirdness.

Added further: Okay, I found some interesting stuff here from the plugin author, and sure enough the post ID had not been set for this. Still having stylesheet issues though, so I set the default skin to the one Kristine made just for me a while back.

Stylesheet resolved? Okay, I took the style declarations out of the header and put them into a separate CSS file, then made a link in the header. Seems okay now. Hoping that this update will post properly at LiveJournal, too, though userpic isn’t showing up right. (Am I boring you yet?) … Okay, changes don’t seem to take until the second time I edit the entry.

And the survey says: ARGH. I have deactivated the plugin for now because it doesn’t seem to behave quite right. On July 5th, though, Unteins said a new version was under active development, so I’ll wait for that. This has so much potential, and I’m still really excited about it, but it will have to wait a little bit.