Astute (or, for that matter, even semi-conscious) readers might’ve noticed by now that I’ve pretty much given up the practice of cross-posting my bloggification to MySpace. LiveJournal is easy – there’s a WordPress plugin to auto-cross-post stuff there. There used to be such a plugin for MySpace, but somewhere along the way, someone changed their API, changed their mind or changed their underwear, and in that change the plugin stopped working and nobody seems to have revived the idea. Those on MySpace who want to keep up can visit my profile, where there’s a little widget there which automatically shows the latest entries – or excerpts thereof – from the blog. I also jumped ship, somewhat regrettably, from a MySpace-esque social networking site called cre8buzz, for the same reason: lack of time. (I had a few reservations about cre8buzz’s tendency to ask everyone to rate everything, from other users to their photos to their links to their blog entries…sheesh. It hadn’t quite become a popularity-contest nightmare when I left, because the invitation-only userbase was largely adult, but just the basic idea there left me a bit unnerved – I had, to coin a phrase, a bad feeling about this. My apologies to those wondering where I went. If indeed such people exist. 😆 ) When I logged into MySpace for the first time since the weekend tonight, I had a zillion private messages…from accounts that had already been deleted because they were spammers who wanted to be my friend. I just don’t have the time to do that kind of housecleaning. Good thing I’ve never even bothered with Facebook, eh?
In News That Will Have My Wife Wanting To Claw Someone’s Eyes Out: apparently USA Network handed Dead Zone and The 4400 – i.e. two of her favorite shows – their pink slips. Both of them left unresolved plot threads dangling. The more I think about it, the more I wonder who’s gutsier in the final analysis: J. Michael Straczynski, for getting the SF genre fixated on long-race story arcs, or the current crop of producers, who plan long-range story arcs with no guarantee that they’ll be seen through to completion on TV. Granted, neither of those shows were freshman-year series with dim prospects for renewal; they’d been around long enough that the expectation was that they’d be sticking around. But the ranks of the Completed Stories – the ones where the show either gets through to the planned end (Babylon 5 and, God – and the WGA and AMPTP – willing, Battlestar Galactica) or has enough advance notice to put at least a semi-satisfying cap on things (Jericho, Farscape or arguably SG-1) – are much thinner than the ranks of shows that set out to tell a bigger story and didn’t make it (Threshold, Invasion, The 4400, Dead Zone, etc.)…so I really wonder who, in the end, has more nerve. That aside, if Burn Notice gets nixed, I can’t be responsible if the Mrs. shows up at USA HQ, hurling a bunch of Evan’s used diapers at the suits there.
In other news, David Tennant is shrugging off the rumors of his (Doctor’s) death in about the vaguest terms possible. Hmmmmmm.
The one thing MySpace has that LiveJournal doesn’t is the ability to subscribe to blogs and receive e-mails when new blog entries are posted. The LiveJournal Friends Page works, when I remember to check it.
You might check into Subscribe2, a WordPress plug-in that allows users to subscribe (and receive e-mails) when entries are posted on your WordPress page. Once you get it working, it’s wonderful. I installed one version and never got it to work; I downloaded an older version, and it worked perfectly. It’s free, and works as advertised.
Heh. I use my subscription to Rob’s MySpace blog to alert me when Rob has updated his LiveJournal blog. It’s not perfect: sometimes the LJ entry is not quite there yet when I get the E-mail (usually, it’s vice-versa). Good enough for me.