Manage your LiveJournal
A few people on my flist have recently been talking about waiting to see if people responded to their comments or about having missed replies people left them.
This is annoying - which is why LJ gives you a solution! Go to your 'manage info' page (http://www.livejournal.com/editinfo.bml), scroll down, and check the 'Receive comment notification e-mails' button (second from the bottom under 'privacy options'). This will make LJ send you an email anytime someone responds to your post or a comment in your post, or if someone responds to a comment you've left anywhere. (Unless LJ goes weird, which happens upon occasion.)
You can also get LJ to send you a copy of any comment you yourself make: tick the 'Receive copies of my own comments via e-mail' button (also under 'privacy options').
Speaking of privacy options, I strongly encourage everyone to think about their privacy on LJ. Sure, it seems like we're talking to a small group of people, but unless you make an effort you're talking to anyone with a modem. (Yes, really. And unless they comment you won't even know they're there - it's amazing how many people are lurking at any given time.) And it's not just people from your personal life who you have to worry about finding your LJ. I know of one person who, upon looking at her personnel file from one of her jobs, found a complete print-out of all her posts.
And not just that: take a look here at this webpage. More specifically, take a look at the comments to it. They're a bit weird and off-topic, aren't they? Now take a look at the comments on this cached version of the page. Look a little familiar? For whatever unfathomable reason, someone's ripped the text from my LJ and posted it as a comment to this (dodgy) internet site.
[On a side note here, you may not know many blogs and journals and even websites can have an RSS feed, which basically take the content from one place and makes it available to people on different systems (ie I can syndicate DeadJournals to read on my LiveJournal flist). For some examples, popular RSS feeds include officialgaiman (Neil Gaiman's blog) or apod (Astrology Picture of the Day). If you're a paid user and you want read a blog through syndication, you can set up an RSS feed for it. Read the LJ FAQ on syndication for info on how to do this, and for general info on syndication.)
Flocked posts don't syndicate, and you can set whether you want full syndication, the title and first paragraph syndicated, or just the title (see here for info on how to do this).]
There are a number of options you have for managing your privacy on LJ:
1) Post anything and everything and hope you'll remain under the radar/anonymous.
There are obvious problems with this. You should assume that if you post publically, anyone you've ever met and everyone you haven't will read your writing and make judgements about you. (And there are many cases where people are travelling along happily until they're linked by someone prominent or by a bunch of people and suddenly they have a few hundred strangers reading their journal and making comments and judgements, so don't think it won't happen.)
2) Post personal things locked, and other things unlocked.
This is known as semi-friends only. What you lock and what you don't is up to you, but you may leave your icons unlocked and everything else locked, or all your humourous cat stories unlocked and everything else locked, or all your mp3s locked and everything else unlocked, or lock/unlock depending on what the little voices tell you. It's a wide range.
3) Post everything locked.
This is known as friends only. You know *exactly* who's reading, but this has two downsides: a) it's hard for new people to get to know you so you don't have the same potential for interaction with others, and b) it's not entirely secure, so you can get a false sense of security. Although it's considered bad manners to quote a flocked post to people not on the filter, people still do it. Remember the saying, 'Two can keep a secret, providing one is dead'? Exactly.
(On yet another side note, you can control who can comment in your LJ to a large extent - everyone, everyone with a livejournal, or just your friends. Then too there's screening...
Anyway, heading back to the 'manage info' page, there are a few boxes you may want to think about.
The first is 'Minimize your journal's inclusion in search engine results', which will put a little piece of code in your journal. This is so that "search engines will be instructed not to include your journal entries in their search results. Not all search engines recognize this request; if you do not want a journal entry to show up in search results, then make sure it is posted private or friends-only." Google respects this code, but even so, it can take two weeks for their spiders to check your journal again, notice the code, and take you off their results.
The other box is 'Notify Weblogs.com of updates', and this ties back to RSS feeds. You don't mind/are happy about people finding your (public) posts through Weblogs.com? Tick this box. You unhappy about it? Uncheck it.
Well, that's all for this post! I hope it's proved in some way helpful or thought provoking for you. On a final note, there's a lot you can change on your userinfo page, and I strongly encourage everyone to at least browse through the options.
This is annoying - which is why LJ gives you a solution! Go to your 'manage info' page (http://www.livejournal.com/editinfo.bml), scroll down, and check the 'Receive comment notification e-mails' button (second from the bottom under 'privacy options'). This will make LJ send you an email anytime someone responds to your post or a comment in your post, or if someone responds to a comment you've left anywhere. (Unless LJ goes weird, which happens upon occasion.)
You can also get LJ to send you a copy of any comment you yourself make: tick the 'Receive copies of my own comments via e-mail' button (also under 'privacy options').
Speaking of privacy options, I strongly encourage everyone to think about their privacy on LJ. Sure, it seems like we're talking to a small group of people, but unless you make an effort you're talking to anyone with a modem. (Yes, really. And unless they comment you won't even know they're there - it's amazing how many people are lurking at any given time.) And it's not just people from your personal life who you have to worry about finding your LJ. I know of one person who, upon looking at her personnel file from one of her jobs, found a complete print-out of all her posts.
And not just that: take a look here at this webpage. More specifically, take a look at the comments to it. They're a bit weird and off-topic, aren't they? Now take a look at the comments on this cached version of the page. Look a little familiar? For whatever unfathomable reason, someone's ripped the text from my LJ and posted it as a comment to this (dodgy) internet site.
[On a side note here, you may not know many blogs and journals and even websites can have an RSS feed, which basically take the content from one place and makes it available to people on different systems (ie I can syndicate DeadJournals to read on my LiveJournal flist). For some examples, popular RSS feeds include officialgaiman (Neil Gaiman's blog) or apod (Astrology Picture of the Day). If you're a paid user and you want read a blog through syndication, you can set up an RSS feed for it. Read the LJ FAQ on syndication for info on how to do this, and for general info on syndication.)
Flocked posts don't syndicate, and you can set whether you want full syndication, the title and first paragraph syndicated, or just the title (see here for info on how to do this).]
There are a number of options you have for managing your privacy on LJ:
1) Post anything and everything and hope you'll remain under the radar/anonymous.
There are obvious problems with this. You should assume that if you post publically, anyone you've ever met and everyone you haven't will read your writing and make judgements about you. (And there are many cases where people are travelling along happily until they're linked by someone prominent or by a bunch of people and suddenly they have a few hundred strangers reading their journal and making comments and judgements, so don't think it won't happen.)
2) Post personal things locked, and other things unlocked.
This is known as semi-friends only. What you lock and what you don't is up to you, but you may leave your icons unlocked and everything else locked, or all your humourous cat stories unlocked and everything else locked, or all your mp3s locked and everything else unlocked, or lock/unlock depending on what the little voices tell you. It's a wide range.
3) Post everything locked.
This is known as friends only. You know *exactly* who's reading, but this has two downsides: a) it's hard for new people to get to know you so you don't have the same potential for interaction with others, and b) it's not entirely secure, so you can get a false sense of security. Although it's considered bad manners to quote a flocked post to people not on the filter, people still do it. Remember the saying, 'Two can keep a secret, providing one is dead'? Exactly.
(On yet another side note, you can control who can comment in your LJ to a large extent - everyone, everyone with a livejournal, or just your friends. Then too there's screening...
Anyway, heading back to the 'manage info' page, there are a few boxes you may want to think about.
The first is 'Minimize your journal's inclusion in search engine results', which will put a little piece of code in your journal. This is so that "search engines will be instructed not to include your journal entries in their search results. Not all search engines recognize this request; if you do not want a journal entry to show up in search results, then make sure it is posted private or friends-only." Google respects this code, but even so, it can take two weeks for their spiders to check your journal again, notice the code, and take you off their results.
The other box is 'Notify Weblogs.com of updates', and this ties back to RSS feeds. You don't mind/are happy about people finding your (public) posts through Weblogs.com? Tick this box. You unhappy about it? Uncheck it.
Well, that's all for this post! I hope it's proved in some way helpful or thought provoking for you. On a final note, there's a lot you can change on your userinfo page, and I strongly encourage everyone to at least browse through the options.