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  • How customizable is a paid Livejournal account? A friend of mine wants to change the layout of her blog. I don’t know whether to recommend she get paid hosting and run WordPress, or just upgrade her existing Livejournal to a paid account.
    I understand that the paid LiveJournal is more customizable than the free version, but I don’t know how much more so.

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  • economically, paid LJ is cheaper than paying for hosting and a domain, but WP is much nicer than any of the other blogging tools i’ve seen, including Xanga and Livejournal.

    If u are looking for community features… LJ is better.
    If u are looking for personal blogging, WP is better.

    Thread Starter RobotHero

    (@robothero)

    Personally, you can have my-hacks.php when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. But she seems committed to the LJ community.
    But still, I’m curious.
    Can you list archives by title instead of date? Can you have multiple bloggers on one blog? Can you have catagories?

    yeah, u can archive by titles, dates (weekly, daily, monthly).
    multiblog from 1 installation is not possible now.
    categories are here. better, multiple category are here… 🙂

    You can have multiple bloggers from one blog.
    I would advise her to go the WP way, since then she can create a standards-compliant, normal webpage using php, and she has absolute control over it.
    Paid livejournal accounts are pretty much the same as free accounts. I have a paid account, and I still can’t include javascripts in my pages, for one. The structure of the LJ page still has to adhere to the already available s1 or s2 styles, unless you want to understand the s2 language (which is not used anywhere else) and whip up your own s2 style, which is not worth the pain. For example, they have a developer hired, who creates s2 styles, and he has come up with 2 new ones in what 8 months? or something close.
    She can keep her free LJ account to keep track of her friends if any and have them keep track of her, and with the lj-update script, updates to her blog will automatically update the LJ.
    The Lj paid account might be cheaper, sure, but WP is more bang-for-the buck. Even a paid LJ account has a url like 2fargon.livejournal.com, not 2fargon.com, for example.
    She can always find cheap hosts, even a free host if she is willing to settle for a subdomain. If she wants her domain, then the cost could be as low as about 2.5 dollars a month, which is about the same as that of a paid LJ account.
    Go WordPress!

    2fargon, that’s not really fair.
    Paid accounts have a *lot* more customizability than free accounts. S2 isn’t hard to use. You suggest using PHP, and, having used both, I can vouch that S2 is no harder. At the very least, the built-in styles are open source, so you can just modify one to suit your needs. There’s no way in hell I could code one from scratch, but modifications were very easy. Their designer has just about finished his fourth style.
    Domains can be linked to paid accounts, e.g. jackola.net.
    Paid accounts also include posts by phone and email, and soon will include picture hosting.
    I wouldn’t be at this forum if WP+private hosting didn’t have features that LJ doesn’t provide, but for $25 per year it’s a good service. Especially since you keep most of your functionality even if you stop paying.

    When I was in the same sort of situation, I looked at it this way:
    Paid Account = $2 a month and I am still limited in what I can do, customization, interface etc..
    The hosting I was already paying for was $7 a month, and I can do whatever I want with it.. not just run a journal.
    The decision was pretty easy. Then I had a friend of mine with a paid LJ make a syndicated account from my RSS feed, and accomplished essentially the same thing.

    or u could have used LL’s LJ Hack to post to LJ automagically while posting on WP Blog.

    Ugh, I despise LiveJournal. Even with my paid account, I seem to be constantly running into speed/loading issues, and I have never figured out the S2 system enough to customize my account more than the tiniest bit. Even just figuring out how to customize using the old system can be a headache. WordPress is vastly superior for personal blogging, if customization is what’s important.

    When my month of live journal ends in March I am leaving them and going to wordpress. The paid account sucks all I have it to do is foward my domain to my live journal address.

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