14 July 2010

And another thing about LJ...

A little more search and experimentation has shown that, in certain LJ themes, you can indeed change the format of the date in both entries and comments to show whatever year you like. This is good.

The bad news is that this is only visible in the comments view if you have a paid or Plus account. A paid account is $20 a year, while a Plus account is free, but puts ads all over your blog. Not only are ads generally annoying (especially with the very limited display and content options LJ provide) but they'd serve as a constant reminder that this blog is not, in fact, taking place 15 years into the future, thus defeating the whole object of getting the Plus account. This irks me.

Four paid LJs will cost me, at current exchange rates, around £55 for the year it'll take for the story to run its course. All told, I suppose it's not a huge amount of money for a Ph.D. project - it costs as much for a couple of bound copies of a paper-based thesis - but what happens after the initial year? I would like to keep the story online - in fact, I'm going to have to until the accompanying thesis is written the entire project assessed - but upwards of £50 a year is pretty steep just to keep the comment time-stamps in the right format. So the options are: pay up, give in to the ads or go with another platform.

2 comments:

  1. Contact the LJ administrators and request some sort of special dispensation/ask whether the comment format will stay the same if the paid accounts expire back into free ones after a year? If LJ isn't being used much by serious writing bloggers, it might be worth it for JL if it might get other people to seriously consider using it, and getting paid accounts for the purpose.

    Nat (autumnpsyche)

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  2. It's worth asking, I suppose...the worst they can do is say no.
    I'll have a word with Frank.

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