Currently listening to: Finesse by Adam Fan Cheng Cheng
Mood: Lazy

Hello everyone! Diyana here.

Welcome to the second episode of blogging platforms that I have tried and my opinions on them. Today’s post is about the longest and most active platform that I’ve used (and probably the platform that got me most traffic, I guess), LiveJournal.

Overview

Image by BloggingPro.Com

LiveJournal was formed by Brad Fitzpatrick under Danga Interactive in 1999 as a way to keep in touch with his high school friends. Then, Livejournal was purchased by an American blog company called SixApart in 2005 and then sold to a Russian company called SUP Media in 2007.

You can read all about LiveJournal here in Wikipedia and in LiveJournal’s official website.

Writing and Posting Entries

Just like Blogger, the writing platform is very easy to use and it’s very beginner’s friendly. You can put in some images, links and stuff.

Just like Blogger, it doesn’t have categories but it has tags. However, most of the time, the tags section is displayed in the column so searching for tag-specific entries shouldn’t be a problem.

Another feature of LiveJournal is the use of LJ-cut. LJ-cut is a tag that you put in your blog post to hide long blog post to prevent endless scrolling on your post. It’s a ‘read more’ but with the benefit of customisation of your text. Live example: My LJ

Other than that, you can set different privacy setting on individual blog posts: public, friends-only or private. This is one of my favourite features as I don’t like to privatise my whole blog. I just want the ability to control individual blog post.

The fun part is that they have a special field for you to insert what song you’re listening to at the moment and if you have Last.Fm, it can sync the track from that app. Another fun part is the emoji or mood field. You can either scroll through the mood theme provided or upload your mood theme (animated mood themes are enabled).

Themes & Layouts

The layout for LiveJournal is pretty much generic. There are your usual two column-layout and your classic online journal theme. Different types of account have different accessibility to different themes. Free accounts tend to have a huge ad on top where it doesn’t seem to decrease in size when I zoom out (Exhibit A: Image above).

Themes are available on the website itself and there are lots to choose from. I’m not sure if you can get any premade themes anywhere else. You can try to design your own by using the classic editor but I would advice you against it.

Additional Features

Other than animated mood themes/emoji and the music field, you can create a community blog (which is something like a forum) where you can connect with other LiveJournal users with similar interests.

LiveJournal also has its own mascot, Frank the Goat who also assist in tech support. More on Frank here.

Image by LiveJournal

Things to Take Note

LiveJournal’s server is hosted in Russia. This shouldn’t be an issue but keep in mind that sometimes it’s susceptible to DDOS attacks causing you not being able to access LiveJournal for a few days. Back when LiveJournal was first purchased by SUP Media, it happened a few times. I’m not sure about now.

I’m not sure if you are able to monetise your LJ blog. I haven’t tried it. So far, nothing on monetisation yet.

Update: Actually, there is achance to monetise your LJ blog. However, it’s only for those who are paid members. That program was introduced in September 2009. You can read about it here and here. Here’s the thing: I am not sure if the program is still available.