Wandering by off friendsfriends- I suspect that point #2 is very much intended by the DW people. As in, if you want to crosspost, and you can crosspost from the DW web interface, then even if LJ is your main journal you'll *still* be logging in to DW and using DW as your gateway. And in time the reflex will be pulling up DW first and you'll shift over to DW primarily.

It's very clever, really. I actually kind of admire it as subtle behavior-shaping.

The thing that sticks with me about the cross-posting interface at DW is that it assumes, a) you want to use a Web interface to post, and b) that DW is your starting point.

But you can still use an editor like Semagic to cross-post, can't you? Or did that option go away, now that the cross-posting interface is up? I thought that the reason for this particular cross-posting interface was to provide an easy way to cross-post for people like me who do actually prefer using a web interface rather than an external editor to post. (Because people using programs like semagic could cross-post fairly easily already.) It's not saying that this is the only way you can cross-post; it's plugging in a hole for people who hadn't been able to cross-post easily until now.

As for assuming that DW is your starting point... Does it actually matter which journal you are using the posting interface on, if it ends up posting to both anyway? It doesn't mean that you can't consider the post to LJ your primary post after that, does it? It becomes a little like using an external web-based program to post, rather than using external software that you install on your computer. So again, I'm not sure how that's assuming anything about what people will use it for.

I've been really looking forward to this feature, actually, because I never got into the habit of using semagic to post. I heard it's still somewhat buggy, though, so I'm going to wait a bit before I start completely relying on it. *g*

Oh! There was actually one thing I noticed about comments on Dreamwidth that I thought might be really useful to you. It looks like you can reply to emailed comments from DW right from your gmail account. So if your work frowns on you using sites like LJ or DW at work, then you can just reply from gmail, and not deal with it! I haven't had a chance to try that out yet, but I think that would be pretty cool if it works! :)

Nope, it works just like the "if your browser can support it" text entry field on LJ e-mailed comments -- dumps you out on the comment page. ::sigh::

...you don't get that option in your LJ e-mailed comments? Huh. Yeah, that I don't know how to answer!

I don't want to start there.

Well, but... it's not like they can do anything about LJ's web interface! Their web posting interface is the only thing they can control. It's not their fault that LJ doesn't have a cross-posting feature, which means that you can't cross-post by starting at the LJ web posting page.

Mind you, I don't completely disagree with inlovewithnight, either - I'm sure the creators in DW don't exactly mind the fact that people have to use their interface instead of LJ's in order to cross-post. But the fact remains that we still can't really blame them for LJ's lack of a cross-posting option.

And also, I haven't tested this, but my brother, who uses an external RSS feed aggregating site pretty much exclusively and doesn't like going to LJ to view his friends' page, told me that the RSS feed for my Dreamwidth journal works much better for him than the LJ RSS feed does. DW preserves the spoiler cuts for him, and my LJ feed doesn't. Now, granted, this is only comparing my LJ and DW journal, so I don't know if other journals will be the same, but that could be a way for you to avoid going to DW if you really don't want to.

I probably will be using Dwdth as my starting point (eventually). But for now I am re-importing my LJ once in a while -- this bring over new entries, and new comments, but doesn't duplicate old entries.

I've definitely seen someone successfully cross-post via email ... maybe morgandawn? I never post by email, myself.

Found it!

http://minim-calibre.dreamwidth.org/560657.html?style=mine

I think so (or, I think it is supposed to). I don't have really comment-heavy entries though, so I didn't notice any changes between the first and second time I imported.