laura_seabrook | SeMagic

The other handy LJ thing that I use is SeMagic, an LJ client for your dedicated computer (rather than using the browser based posting system).

The advantage of the browser based method of posting is that you can do it at any computer that you're logged onto LJ with. The advantage of using a dedicated client (and it's the same with e-mail clients) is all the extra stuff that you can do with it. You can find a list of downloadable clients (for different platforms) at the LJ site.

You'll find a community page for SeMagic at ljwin32_sema and there's a download page too. SeMagic is Windows only, but it is feature rich. The "about" help file page says:

In comparison with web interface, the client offers additional editing operations including WYSIWYG editing, macro shortcuts, autoreplace, spellchecking in different languages using either MS Word ( or OpenOffice) or internal spellchecker, saving and loading entries to/from files including preformatted drafts and autosave. Also the client can notify about friends’ birthdays, track changes of friends list and notify about updates at friends’ journals using checkfriends protocol.

I think I like it because I can fiddle with my entries so much, and I especially like the History function (see screenshot below) as I can easily search for old posts and get URLs for them.

You can also set up more than one account, and on more than one server (like LiveJournal and Insane Journal, see pic below) and also post to multiple logins/servers. For folk thinking of migrating from LJ, this is one way of still keeping the ones they left behind up to date.