ljKlient — a KDE LiveJournal client

This is supposed to be the ljKlient homepage. Welcome!

What is ljKlient?

ljKlient, as the name suggests, is a piece of software for use with LiveJournal and other sites which use their server code. Clients such as this one have been made to get around the clumsiness and the unreliability (if that’s even a word) of the web-based interface available on LJ, but as time and technology have progressed, the importance of standalone posting software has waned. Still, some people find it more convenient to use a separate piece of software, something independent of their web browser.

With ljKlient, I’m trying to fill the gap of clients in the KDE world. Few have been made, most have since been abandoned and as such are extremely outdated. I also try to make the client easy and obvious to use; at this early stage of development we’re lacking settings whatsoever, but the client Just Works with its defaults, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem.

How do I get it?

Simple, just go to our SourceForge Downloads page and poke around. Keep in mind that the 0.0.x series is completely unsupported now and is only there for your curiosity. It should not have any grave bugs though — I didn’t lose half my LiveJournal while using it.

I’m currently developing the 0.1.x series, which has a lot more features and a much better internal structure. Development happens on a 32-bit x86 computer running Ubuntu Linux, but it should work on any other Linux flavour, granted you install the required dependencies.

On a Debian-style system such as Ubuntu, the only direct dependency you have is python-kde3, also known as the PyKDE Bindings. Should you be missing something, APT will take care of the rest, such as kdelibs (>= 3.5.4) and python (>= 2.4).

How do I install it?

If you have a dpkg/apt based system such as Debian or Ubuntu, you should have gotten the .deb file from the download page. Once you have it, you should run dpkg -i ljklient-0.1.nnn.deb as superuser, where nnn is the version number, of course. On Ubuntu, you run things as superuser with the sudo command, other systems do typically have a root user one can login to. Your mileage may vary.

For other systems, it’s advisable that you get the “source” release. It is a weird thing to say, considering we’re talking about a Python software, which, Python being an interpreted language, is distributed in source form anyway. In any case, you can put the source files wherever you want, even in a directory somewhere in your home dir. The Debian package uses the following places, but keep in mind that your distribution might disapprove of these:

Main files (*.py)
/usr/share/ljklient/
Artwork (artwork folder, the few icons and such)
/usr/share/ljklient/artwork/
Translations (translations/LL/ljklient.mo files)
/usr/share/locale/LL/LC_MESSAGES/ljklient.mo
LL of course is the language code. Whichever you want to install. E.g. the Hungarian file translations/hu/ljklient.mo will have to become /usr/share/locale/hu/LC_MESSAGES/ljklient.mo
Alternatively, you could drop these under ~/.kde/share/locale/LL/LC_MESSAGES/ljklient.mo
Link to the executable
We also create a /usr/bin/ljklient symlink to /usr/share/ljklient/ljklient.py
Debris
A word which here means the other files found in the archive you downloaded.
They can be ignored with as much hubris as you see fit.
(Okay, I admit that was a really below-par pun.)

So it’s not English only?

Most certainly not! Currently we have the following localisations available:

This also means, by the way, that I take extra care that should you try to use fancy characters (Unicode) in your posts, it will work.

If you’d like to translate into a language not listed, please get in contact with me — and if you’d like to update a language that’s already there: browse around and get a .po file to mess with. In case of emergency, ask.

I’ve run it, and there’s a .ljKlient directory in my home

While we don’t really have settings as such at the moment, there are a few things that end up cached. This is mainly for speed purposes, but also is a way of being nice to the LiveJournal server. I mean, I suppose you don’t want to download all your usericons every single time. That takes a lot of time, as I’m sure you’ve noticed when you first logged in with it.

Another thing that ends up stored here is your friendlist. It’ll be useful in the future, now it only serves caching purposes (so you really don’t need to smash Update every time you open the friendlist window).

Just what can it do, anyway?

As of 0.1.172, ljKlient is capable of: