Using LJ

[cos]

One day last year, a friend asked me if I were going to her party that weekend. What party, I asked? It seems she'd posted about it on her LJ, twice. I read her LJ regularly, but had missed both of those posts, and she hadn't sent out email invitations, but was surprised I didn't know about the party.

Another person on my friends list (several, actually) sometimes posts on LJ to call a Dim Sum outing. He just wants some people to come, not any specific individuals, and expects to sometimes be surprised by people he wouldn't have expected to respond. LJ is the perfect tool for that.

People write on LJ for a mostly consistent readership they expect to know, so unlike with most blogs, LJ writers often don't think about newcomers or casual surfers when they write. This can fail, too, because even the people you know haven't been there for every post since the beginning, usually. There are some people on my friendslist who sometimes talk about "BPAL". Presumably, at some point, this abbreviation was defined, but I've never seen it in the year or so since I've seen it being used. On most non-LJ blogs, an abbreviation like that would be explained in each post it's used in, but on LJ, how long do you go before filling your new readers in?

barmaidblog is a well-done hybrid: she writes in LJ style, but with a "typical" blog audience in mind. One of her adaptations for that audience is that every reference to a person or event she expects her readers to be familiar with, is a link the first time it appears in a post. Links lead back to earlier posts so new readers can drill back as far as they need to build up as much context as they want at the time.

( ... and then there's the classic case of "breakup via LJ" - I've seen a few of those ...)

What are some ways people you read use LiveJournal that don't quite work? Or that do work, in LJ-specific and interesting ways?

Comments

[tafkats.livejournal.com]

Another downside to posting vital things, party invitations, etc., on LiveJournal: I rarely read people's journals through any other medium than my own friends list, and I find sometimes that I've missed a lot of posts because, for whatever reason, one person's time stamp is several hours earlier than mine and/or most of the other people I read. So I'll read through the friends list until I encounter something I recognize and then stop, but I'll miss somebody's post because even though they wrote it after the last time I checked, the time stamp is earlier so it ends up behind posts I've already read.

[lightcastle.livejournal.com]

I know. Drives me nuts sometimes. My announcement that I was moving to Santa Barbara got eaten by the time stamp gods and no one saw it.

[leora.livejournal.com]

That doesn't actually make sense... your friends page is not affected in any way by the timestamp an entry is given. Friends pages are ordered by the time an entry is posted according to LiveJournal's servers, precisely to avoid the problem you describe. The timestamp the entry is assigned is displayed, but it doesn't affect the ordering on your friends page. Personal journals are ordered by the timestamp given, so this would be the case if you went to someone's personal journal and they ordered things out of order.

However, it's possible that your friends are marking the entries as "backdated" or the feature they just renamed to "entry out of order" or whatever it's currently called. That allows someone to post an entry to a personal journal that is given a timestamp earlier than the most recent entry posted that doesn't have that option enabled (I know that concept is hard to follow, and this is one of the most confusing everyday options LJ has, but that is the way it works, and I don't think I can make it clearer without examples) and every option that is marked that way - regardless of its timestamp and regardless of whether the user needed to mark it that way or not to accomplish what they wanted to do or whether they just don't really know how things work will not display on friends pages at all. That's part of what the feature does, it prevents the entry from displaying on any page that orders the entries by actual time posted rather than by timestamp. So, if friends are messing with that, you may be missing their entries because of it.

Otherwise, I'd be more prone to think you're missing it by reading from older to more recent and not refreshing and thus missing entries as new ones come and you click next 20 (or whatever number) and skip some that got pushed back such that they would have appeared on your current skipback. Or that you're missing some due to browser caching. Or you're just plain not noticing some. Or a user might have posted with a higher security level and then edited it so that you could see it, and then it's later in your page and you don't notice it (I do this sometimes as a way to make sure the post is right before I make it visible to the people I want able to see it).

All told, LJ is a great way to stay informed about people's lives in a general sort of way, and a very bad way to ensure that vital information gets to people.

[cos]

A lot of people use timestamps as a way to tell how far back to read. They know approximately when they last read, so when they reach a post from around that time, they figure they're "caught up". A poor substitute for marking what's read & unread, but LJ doesn't have that feature so people make up ways that mostly work for them.

I mostly use memory of what I've seen and haven't seen, but that trips up sometimes too, when I see a few posts out of order and then later reach them again and think I've caught up when I haven't - the timestamp method avoids that problem, but has its own.

[tafkats.livejournal.com]

Hm... interesting. It also occurred to me that maybe some time elapsed between them starting the entry and posting it, enough for the time generated when the page was opened to be a few hours behind the time it was actually entered into the system.