No, really. This isn't funny anymore. Who IS this?

[catsittingstill]

It's me.  Honest.  I just have a quick question:  dan_ad_nauseam has set up an InsaneJournal account.  InsaneJournal has the same code as LJ, supposedly.  Do any of my clever techie friends have suggestions on how I could add his InsaneJournal account to my LJ friends page?  When I pull up "Manage your friends" I don't see any way to do it.

In other news, I made my first Wikipedia edit today.  A statue of the Flying Spagetti Monster has been put up on the Crossville Tennessee county courthouse lawn (thanks to Dan for the link to the link to the link), and I felt this important landmark should be added to the "points of interest" section of the Crossville, Tennessee Wikipedia page.  If *I* went to Crossville, *I'd* stop to see it.

I don't know if my edit will be allowed to stand.  I guess we'll see.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

FSM? Crossville?! Wow, whodathunkit? They're a whole lot more enlightened on that side of the Cumberlands, then... over in Lutrell (which isn't too far from you, alas) they take days off from public school to attend revivals, and what few folks don't end up pressured into going get bullied and beat up. (I was glad my little sister got out of Union County...)

Glad to hear the Enlightenment is spreading.

More on RSS'ing InsaneJournal in a separate comment.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Um. Actually Crossville has only started letting other religions put displays on the courthouse lawn because the ACLU sent them a polite letter to the effect that they can't let one religion have displays and fence other religions out. I'm pretty sure from the article that the mayor of Crossville is not very happy about the FSM being there.

But I'm hoping the Enlightenment will spread even here in Tennessee.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Hey, credit where credit is due, they didn't have to sue for the privilege... I'll be more than happy to settle for a polite reminder being sufficient. There and in this generation anyway. (Give it another ten years, and I'm gonna raise the bar. :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

What you want to do is add an RSS feed of Dan's IJ.

OK. Not so simple for those with a Basic account, so I will subvert LJ for you. They won't let you create a new feed with a Basic, so I went ahead and did it. Now you can go to http://www.livejournal.com/syn/ then scroll to the bottom and tell it you want to add http://dan-ad-nauseam.insanejournal.com/data/rss/ - it will come up and ask if you want to add danadnausemij. Tell it yes, and add it to your Default View group if you have one. Done! Now, if he's got locked entries, this probably won't work so good.... but I doubt he will, knowing Dan. If he does, then we have to resort to trickier bits.

[mdlbear]

Just to add a bit of explanation: IJ, like a number of other sites, uses the LJ software. But it's a separate site, with totally separate accounts, friends lists, and so on. You can't just add an IJ account to your LJ friends list, because it isn't an account known to LJ's servers.

What technoshaman has done is make a "feed" on LJ that looks over on IJ every once in a while to see whether Dan has posted anything new. Not really a good solution, because it only gets public posts -- if Dan posts anything friends-locked on IJ, you'd have to have an IJ account and be on his IJ friends list to read it.

Clumsy, but there's nothing better at the moment.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Alas, I think only paid accounts can look at such feeds. At least, I kept getting error messages when I tried to add it.

Hmm. Wait; I just thought of something. Hmm.

Okay, I went to my manage friends page and tried to add danadnausemij as if he were an lj friend. LJ says it was successful. Hmmm. We'll see!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Ha! It works! Dan's InsaneJournal posts show up on my lj friends page. Hurrah!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Aaarg! I appreciate your efforts, but I have tried three times to add this feed, and it doesn't want to work; I get the message

"Error

The URL you have entered is not currently being syndicated on this site but you must upgrade to a paid account to have the ability to create new syndicated feeds.

[<< Back]"

I tried copying and pasting the url you gave (the http://dan-ad-nauseam.../rss/ one). I tried adding danadnausemlj, and I tried opening the /rss/ one and copying the url from the top bar and adding that, and I got the same response all three times. Maybe LJ needs a little longer to think about the feed? Except when I click on the feed danadnausemlj I get the right feed, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Oh, you know, I think maybe only paid accounts can add feeds to their friendslists...

Sigh.

Well, thanks for trying, anyway. I really appreciate it.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Okay, I tried something else; I went to my manage friends page and tried to add danadnausemij as if he were a friend with an lj account. The page claims it was successful. We'll see.

Anyway--thanks a lot for helping me out with this! I appreciate it.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Looks right as far as I can tell. Bad ol' LJ, bein' persnickety like that.

Oh, that's too cool. GTKspell (the Linux spell checker) thinks "persnickety" is a legitimate word. :)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It works! Adding danadnausemij puts his insane journal posts up on my friends page! They don't have quite the same timestamps as they do on insane journal, but I can live with that.

However I think when I comment on them in lj it does not get ported across to ij. So I'll have to actually click on the posts themselves to comment. But mostly what I was worried about was missing them entirely, so the feed is a big help.

Thank you!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

That is correct, you have to click in the IJ link and go comment on IJ for him to see them. But at least you'll know they're there. And in theory there's a way to use your LJ password to be "registered" over there (with OpenID) but I don't know how to do that yet.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I can help with that.

You go over there to comment, and click the OpenID radio button.

When it says enter URL, you enter your url for your livejournal page. (Probably for you it would be http://technoshaman.livejournal.com).

Type in your response and click "post comment."

If you're already logged into livejournal you see a lj-type page saying "Grant identity validation? i.e., that such and such a site is asking to confirm your identity, do you want lj to pass your identity on. You can pick yes always (which I think means always for this site), or yes just this time, or no.

If you click "yes just this time" it posts, with your lj URL on it for your name. I'm not sure what happens with the other options.

Chainsaw iconography...?

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

Re: the iconography carved with a chainsaw (mentioned in the article), I find myself poised between admiration for all that implicit power-tool dexterity and a sudden unbidden mental replay of the last few seconds of a recent horror-parody Bud Lite commercial:

Guy with an axe who has just been picked up at night by a young couple (because he has a 6-pack of BL), sitting in the backseat, observing that there's *another* hitchhiker with a 6-pack of BL showing up in the headlights: "But he's got a chainsaw!"

Okay, it's Tennessee, not Texas. But still.

Re: Chainsaw iconography...?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Chainsaw carving is like bears dancing. It's not that they carve so well, it's that they can do it at all...

Re: Chainsaw iconography...?

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

I think I prefer the bears. ;-)

The mayor sounds like he's considering whether to be offended by the FSM, sort of like a jihadist looking at a cartoon and wondering how best to demonstrate that he has no sense of humor.

One never wants to be asked, "Are you a Christian/Muslim/Scientologist?" by someone holding a chainsaw or wearing a vest full of lumps and wires.

Re: Chainsaw iconography...?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

One never wants to be asked, "Are you a Christian/Muslim/Scientologist?" by someone holding a chainsaw or wearing a vest full of lumps and wires.

I think I prefer the bears too!

Re: Chainsaw iconography...?

[aunty_marion]

There doesn't seem to be a picture of the chainsaw-carvings, but actually, they can be surprisingly good. I go to a huge craft fair at Hatfield House, about 20 miles north of London, every spring, and there's almost always a stand there with chainsaw-carved stuff, and they often do demonstrations of it. There are mini-totem-poles for garden decorations or bird tables, and chairs and so on; some of it is very intricate and delicate!

What boggles me almost more than the fact that they're doing it with a chainsaw is the way anyone can take a lump of wood and hack bits out of it to make a picture of something. How the heck do they know where to cut? My sculptural talents extend to approximating snake-heads for the tops of knitted-Lucius pimp-canes, and I sweat blood over every one of those!

Re: Chainsaw iconography...?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The article in the Crossville paper about the Flying Spaghetti Monster (linked to in the Wikipedia article for Crossville, Tennessee) has a picture of another courthouse lawn statue of Jesus carrying a cross. It's not obvious from the picture, but the article states that it's chainsaw-carved (unless there are *two* statues of Jesus carrying a cross on the courthouse lawn, which strikes me as excessive even for Tennessee).

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

LOL that's so kewl! I've told some of my FSM friends about it. Thanks for the link. Giggle.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) You're welcome.

[mdlbear]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossville%2C_Tennessee

Now you should make yourself a user page. Come to think of it, so should I.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, I created an account. Does that count? I'm CatFaber.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Creating an account gets you a blank user page; if you're logged in to Wikipedia and you click on your name in the upper right corner where it's telling you you're logged in, it will let you edit your user page.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. Thanks.

I didn't actually add very much. But I appreciate knowing how to get to it.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I added a couple of sentences. I couldn't figure out how to use the boxes that say things like "native english speaker." Everytime I added what I thought should be the appropriate template it came out saying I spoke english and spanish. Oh well.

It looks to me like a lot of people don't much bother to add stuff to their user pages anyway.

I tell ya,

[sffilk.livejournal.com]

this is way cool. Thanks for the info!