If you’re on Tumblr and curious about this, follow the link over to see this post on Livejournal. (LJ does not automatically crosspost to Tumblr; I used a web app called IFTTT to do that.)
Feel free to say hi to me in the comments on this post! You don’t even need to have an account. ^_^ But you could leave your name in your post so that I know who you are. (Sometimes, even people with LJ accounts are too lazy to log in and just do it this way.)
Livejournal has the capability to do a ‘read more,’ although on LJ it’s called an ‘LJ cut.’ I’m not sure if this translates to Tumblr, but I’m testing it right below.
Now, some information about the basics of Livejournal:
- Like Tumblr, LJ has blog themes you can choose from for your blog layout. Once you pick one, you can customize colors and other things. If you want to create an LJ and you’re not sure what to do, you can just pick a simple layout to start with.
- Unlike Tumblr, you don’t get sideblogs. It’s one LJ blog per username/account. You also can’t change your username whenever you want–although you can buy a rename token if you’re intent on it.
- If you look down at the bottom on the actual LJ post, you can see that LJ posts have tags just like on Tumblr. Except tags on LJ are actually useful, since you can find them and then sort and filter by categories. Almost like you might conceivably want to find something you wrote before!
- Also like Tumblr, LJ has a dashboard. If you have an LJ account, you can follow other peoples’ blogs and then read the feed of them.
- LJ also has communities! I said you can’t have sideblogs…but I guess that’s sort of a lie. You can set up a community (and add other moderators, if you want) and then people can join and you can make posts (and decide whether you want members to be able to make posts) and chat about stuff. You can have as many communities (‘comms’ for short) as you like. Some people basically do use them as sideblogs.
- LJ has the capability to ‘friends-lock’ things. That means that you have public entries, private entries, AND ALSO entries that only the people you choose can see! In communities, you can set community access to be public or private to its members.
- You know what? I haven’t messed with the LJ mobile app. I don’t know how good it is. Maybe it sucks, in which case if you use your phone for this stuff a lot, that could be a drawback.
Finally, LJ has the ability to do spoiler text! This is a bit of text that is collapsed unless you click the thing to read it.I imagine spoiler text probably does not translate to Tumblr, so you can probably see that there. But on my LJ, you’ll see what it looks like collapsed.
Edit: Like it or not, LJ is a site run by a for-profit company. It’s doing pretty well, these days, but that can always change. If you prefer open source, non-profit or just a site that may have a bit less functionality but you can trust more not to change, check out Dreamwidth. It’s an LJ clone, run on the same software so it works the same, but it’s owned by a non-profit that was created specifically to give people an alternative place to go.
LJ and Dreamwidth work so well together that you can move between them and share information between them pretty easily. It’s not perfect, but if you’re on one, then you can mostly use the other.
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