LiveJournal has gotten rid of their invite code system. What does that mean? It means my few remaining holdout friends (or those friends who initially gave in but quickly regressed) without blogs need to get one. Right now.

I know LJ carries a sort of stigma–just as Geocities is the source and font of crappy web pages about one’s cat, LJ is the source and font of angsty emo drama. And bad spelling. And typing in all lower case.

But let’s face it: as far as free solutions go, it’s the best all-in-one publishing / aggregation tool out there. Of course NewsBruiser is better blogging software, and of course Feed on Feeds is a better RSS reader. But they need server space to run on, and many people just don’t have that, or don’t want to pay for it. LJ provides that free space, along with grained access control, easy (but deep) configuration, and good documentation. Plus it’s open-source.

It’d be easy to go over there and snap up a bunch of free journals to compartmentalize things, but of course I don’t need to do that–I can create more NewsBruiser notebooks any time I want, and I’ve always got Zomziepie, Spam As Folk Art and Ruse You Can Bruise to write in.

What I did do, though, is create a new community. Hey, road trip people! I know almost all of you already have LJs, and if you don’t, there’s no reason not to get one now. And then when you do, it is hereby required that you roll on up and post at Calicomicon!