Well, I've been using LJ exclusively now for about two and a half weeks. Man, it seems like a lot longer than that! So, I decided to take a little time this morning to kind of discuss my thoughts so far. I am happy to report that my only regret is that I didn't switch sooner. It is quite obvious that I've been posting more than I did with my other two locations, (is this a good thing or a bad thing), and I'm able to reply to comments without having to actually go to the web site to comment. I think the neatest part of LJ though is the way people are so linked. I mean, looking at the user info for people you can get a list of the friends they've got, and then get the friends of those people, so on and so forth. I just find it interesting to see the overlap between the different lists. It's just a really cool thing for me.

Then, there's the client thing. On blogger I used Blogger for Word, which was nice because I could write my entries in Word and then post them directly. This was great, and I could use Word to create my links and things, but I didn't get a lot of formatting options. The formatting that I did was often lost after posting. I tried the email post option once and didn't like that at all. My post had pretty much no formatting which was even worse. On Word Press, I really did like the web interface. They created several hotkeys that would insert HTML tags for me so that I could fill in the information. I know HTML and used it for several years to manually code my web site; (which no longer exists since I switched to Roadrunner and started blogging). But, I'm all about quick and easy, so if there's a way to speed up the code, and reduce the chances of human error, then it was all good and I wanted to take advantage of it. So, after trying one program for Word press which really wasn't all that accessible, I just used the web interface. I had lots of coding options, and it really did meet my needs, accept that I couldn't really post from mobile locations. From the PAC Mate I could get to the page, and I could see every field and button except for the body of the post. Then, just before switching I started using remote desktop so that I could connect to my computer through my PM, and it allowed me to post from other places in this apartment without being chained to my computer. But I still wasn't satisfied. (Yes, you guessed it, I want it all! SMILE!) This is when I started looking at Live Journal. I figured that I all ready had a username, and many of the people that I read were on LJ, so to me it made logical sense. I read about the differences in the three different account types, free, sponsored, and paid, and decided that $19.95 per year was more than reasonable considering that if I were ever to get my own domain I'd probably have to pay a heck of a lot more than that per year to maintain it. So, I did it. and, the more I work with it, the more I'm glad I made the switch. I was talking about clients though. (Man, I sure do know how to ramble!) Several months ago I downloaded a client that is apparently just called Live Journal. I wanted to play with it and get familiar with it so that I could make it easier for voyagerjc to post to his journal. Well, that sort of hooked me on the whole posting thing, so I used that until now. I've been reading in a lot of different locations about the Semagic client, so decided to get it and see what it was like. And, I gotta tell you, it blows the Live Journal program out of the water! My only problem, (and it seems that everyone is having this problem at first), is trying to figure out how to get at the post options. There's a hotkey, and it changes something on the screen, but tabbing doesn't seem to work. So, I'm going to work on that. Otherwise, I really like this client. Oh, and I can get a count of my words, so I can kind of keep track of how long my posts are. That, to me, is really a nice option! Also, the fact that I can use Microsoft Word's spell checker doesn't hurt my feelings any either. SMILE!

As I've mentioned before, I've used the email option several times to post entries. This lets me send email from anywhere and doesn't mess up my formatting. This means that I can post even if I'm on the road, or just don't feel like sitting in front of my computer.

Finally, there's the phone post option. I did this with Blogger, but there are really a lot more options with the phone feature in LJ. This lets me be even more lazy! SMILE! I hate the way I sound in recordings though, so this isn't something I'll probably do very often, but it's definitely nice to know the feature is there if I want it.

Well, I haven't covered all the features I like about LJ, but you're probably getting really bored with this entry so I'll stop here. Anyway, I'm nearing 1000 words, and I figure that's a good place to stop. So, I'm going to go for now and see how this works to post an entry.