Goodbye LJ! Hello BlogSpot!

I think it's time to say bye-bye for LiveJournal and welcome the new blogging engine, which will be Blogger.com. The choice of this very blogging engine was mostly spontaneous, I was attracted mostly by nice compose window (image styling, integration with Picasa albums). Why not to try?
Nanoblogging like twitter is too limiting for me. I tend to type a lot of text, I feel happier when I apply different formatting where appropriate. Google Weave is a small step forward, also nice for micro blogs, dedicated for one narrow topic but is too limited. At least they could have added support of more verbose wiki-style (e.g. lists, font style).

In LJ I was mostly composing in HTML mode. Crazy! The last drop into the tap of my dissatisfaction was the removal of class support for <img> tags. Well, if you have removed certain piece of functionality, please provide the backward compatibility for old posts!

Ideally blog engine should support some kind of wiki syntax. That is why in first go I have looked at various engines, which support markdown syntax (Posterous and Tumblr) but I was not impressed too much. My next but not least concern was the size of community: obviously if the community is smaller, you have less support, fewer community addons and hints. For Blogger engine one can try GreaseMonkey script, that translates the post to HTML, or another JS-solution, that translates specially marked <pre> tags into HTML. Any experience with that?

What should be further investigated? Yes, cross-posting. I still would like my LJ friends to keep on interesting in what is in my mind from their lovely journal blog. WordPress would be a better choice in favor of Blogger, as it supports cross-posting to LJ out of the box. First I tried simple, but easy to setup approach: username+PIN@post.livejournal.com interface. Works unattended but removes all formatting from post message (forget about images) and reformats the message for 80 columns (somebody reads blogs from DOS? or has got monochrome CRT?). OK, let's have a look at something serious: blog2blog.Nice piece of software, but from the 1st post I've found a bug: it does not correctly process the quotes inside attributes, e.g. style="font-family: "Courier New"". So the question is still opened. Would be nice if poster would support flagging the posts which are already cross-posted and running in batch mode (with all options set in command-line).

I will share the news if something else comes out.