An LJ problem - what do you guys suggest?

[drwex]

I've bumped up against a limit of LJ I didn't know existed - you can't have more than X tags (where I think X = 1000).

What? You say, that's crazy. How can you have 1k tags? Well, I blame mizarchivist who, about five years ago, convinced me to start tagging my music posts. This is SUPER convenient, since I can easily go back and see where I've talked about a particular band or artist and compare how they sounded back then to now. I have lots of music stories in there, too.

According to LJ I have 238 posts now tagged "music." If you figure that each entry mentions up to five artists then you can see how I'd easily bump up against the limit, even with repetitions. I've bought myself a little time by eliminating some duplicates and unused tags as well as normalizing names (is it "KLF" or "the KLF" or "K.L.F." for example). But this is a problem I don't see a way around. Even upgrading to a paid LJ account would not (I think) get me more tags.

The vast majority of those tags are used only once. I could, in theory, cull those. Lord knows many of the URLs are dead nowadays. But each of them marks a thing that caught my ear at some point and I can't inherently tell which ones are going to come back. I'm pretty sure I'll never blog another Dan Balan track again, but it was such an excellent story I don't want to lose it.

So I'm at a crossroads here and not sure what to do. Seeking advice.

Comments

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

Paid accounts do get you more tags: http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq/226.html - You know, if you care enough to pay for it.

You could see if you could create your content using a different service, and have it published to LiveJournal automatically. Dreamwidth will do this, and WordPress might as well.

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

Oh, you could try using something like delicious.com to be a third-party tagging database.

[drwex]

How?

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether you're familiar with delicious.com, so the basic idea of it is that you bookmark URLs there. As you bookmark it, you have the ability to add a tag to the URL.

So, it's possible to export the LiveJournal URLs and associated tags out of LiveJournal, and then import them into delicious. Then you could do your searching by tag on delicious, and just have to follow the link to LiveJournal.

[drwex]

I'm not sure how the publishing elsewhere would solve the tag problems. Though LiveJournal's lack of searchability does bug me and an external content repository might. Hrm, it's a thought worth thinking. Moving 238 posts to another source, though, is intimidating.

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

Both Dreamwidth and WordPress have importers to perform the move for you.

[c1.livejournal.com]

Were it me, I'd post as normal to LJ/DW, and then periodically export your posts to an offline database. Might be a bit more labour intensive (though scripting could probably streamline that to a point where it's nearly no extra work at all) but you'd have as many tags as you could ever want.

And if the PIC ever decides it wants to axe LJ, your posts are secure.

[drwex]

I've tried various export programs over the years, but none are satisfactory. The best one (ljarchive) is no longer maintained and thus broken. ljbook works OK but it produces an unholy blob of XML that I'd still need some front end to manage.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Have you tried creating a Word Press blog and exporting your entire LJ to that?

[lifecollage.livejournal.com]

And the content manager tries a different tack: tag by genre/subgenre of music, rather than individual artist, unless you really want the artist as in your example? Yes, it means going back and adding a tag or two to 238 posts, and then deleting the artist tags you don't want to keep, but that might be easier (by some definitions) than the export solutions mentioned above. It also scales after you do this initial work.

[drwex]

I did originally tag by content type, but that didn't work for me in part because the music I'm blogging doesn't tend to fit into categories well (except, often, the very vague "electronic dance music") and the artists I'm talking about often cross genre boundaries the way you or I might cross New England state lines.

[lifecollage.livejournal.com]

Understood. I'll admit I haven't followed those posts closely enough to suggest other tag concepts, but perhaps by BPM or something entirely other than standard categories? It only has to make sense to you, after all, or you could add an explanatory post/table of contents.

[drwex]

I have actually thought about using some kind of Table of Contents. My theory was to make one post that would hold all the one-use tags and be a similar reference point. That would free up a huge number of tag slots I could use for anything I mention more than once.

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

FWIW: I used ljdump fairly successfully recently to get my stuff off LJ so I could load it into another platform (that I'm building). It just traverses the API and dumps XML. It can also convert to WordPress dump format, but that conversion is lossy.

I don't actually use tags, so I've no idea if ljdump handles them properly.

Alas, the thing I'm building isn't in any state where I could suggest you try it. :-)

[mizarchivist]

This is a complex one considering the limitations of the platform. Because you want something easily referable/ searchable. I've been paying for LJ for... well, most of the time, so my baseline isn't yours on this... and I am very conservative in creating new tags. Yeah, I dunno