Ben's Bazaar

So today I tweaked this site to cross-post entries to both my LiveJournal and DreamWidth accounts. Until now I have only been cross-posting to LiveJournal using this plugin.

I figured that most people who want to cross-post to both LiveJournal and DreamWidth would configure the plugin to update DreamWidth and then configure DreamWidth to update LiveJournal. I decided against this because I did not want to provide DreamWidth with my LiveJournal authentication information, whereas the WordPress data is on my own server. So the answer was clearly to take care of both external sites from WordPress.

My solution was very easy to implement.

The first step was to go to the WordPress plugins directory. Then create a directory called dw-xp/ and copy the lj-xp.php file from the lj-xp directory, renaming it dw-xp.php. Then open it in a text editor (I used Emacs, of course) and do a search and replace for the following (case sensitive): LiveJournal becomes DreamWidth, livejournal.com becomes dreamwidth.org and ljxp becomes dwxp.

Once that is done a DreamWidth plugin will appear in the Dashboard which can be activated and configured as normal. The first search and replace is necessary to make this copy of the plugin appear as being for DreamWidth in the Dashboard. The second one is probably not necessary, but may as well be done. The third one is the most important because it sets the variables in the WordPress database and you don’t want it to conflict with the LiveJournal configuration.

The same process can be used to have a separate plugin for multiple LiveJournal based sites (e.g. DeadJournal).

Originally published at Organised Adversary. Please leave any comments there.