Crossposting: yes, though since I post to LJ via my own custom software I have yet to work out whether it'll be easier to have that or DW do the crosspost...

Page layout: actually, I sorted that out way back in 2009 when I set up my OpenID presence, and did the porting work to adapt my custom style to the (small) changes in the Dreamwidth version of S2. So this time round it was no trouble at all – I just pasted the layout code I already had into this account, and it worked just as well here as there.

(Though I notice there are a couple of things wrong with it, most immediately the absence of the standard Dreamwidth 'you are logged in as foo, handy links and stuff' bar at the top. I may have to work out how to get that to show up.)

Welcome: thank you! :-)

The bar at the top we call the "Navigation Strip"; there's a full range of settings in the Display settings tab. (Basically one of the first changes that DW made to the LJ codebase was to give much finer control of where the nav strip is visible, and to display it on a per-user basis rather than a per-journal basis, so that people don't need to impose their preferences on everyone else.)

The layout porting thing, I should have guessed you'd find it pretty straightforward! I keep getting people asking me how to do it, and I say, oh, you just change these three variable names and these two functions, and they complain that's way too complicated. But we did try not to break S2 too much when we were modernizing and rationalizing it (and that was a dev task that I was pretty heavily involved in, so I'm somewhat proud of it).

Custom posting software, hm. What are you doing for backup / archiving? Because I used to use LJArchive, which has a Windows GUI, but it times out trying to back up the whole of my Dreamwidth journal. I think what I need is some kind of script I can run that will talk to DW's content exporter (Perl or Python or whatever more knowledgeable geeks convince me is suitable); do you have any ideas about that side of it?

there's a full range of settings in the Display settings tab

Thanks; I hadn't spotted that. Unfortunately all the boxes are ticked and the navigation strip still isn't showing up for me; my guess is that that's because my S2 code is failing to call whatever method optionally inserts the navigation strip into the generated HTML. I should probably just go and find the docs and work out what I should have called and where. (Which of course will be easier now you've told me the proper name for it.)

Custom posting software, hm. What are you doing for backup / archiving?

Hmmm. Perhaps I should have said "horrible hacky script" instead of "custom software", to give you a better idea of its general level of organisation :-) I don't have a full-on client by any means; all I've got is one script which lets me write posts in a markup language I made up off the top of my head, and then formats them into HTML for LJ, into plain text for posting to a private journals newsgroup, and into colour-enhanced plain text for posting to Monochrome BBS (where I've maintained an online diary since before LJ and blogging were famous :-).

Archiving of my LJ is something to which I have so far not taken a particularly joined-up approach. The posts I make are archived in the form I post them on Monochrome, because I happened to already have the technology to do that. Comments on my posts are archived either in my email archive (which is why I like self-comment notifications) or in a big directory of HTML files I created one day by spidering my entire LJ (the idea being that the latter covers all the comments from before I started keeping those emails).

It would probably be a good idea to look into sensible content exporters, but it's a long way down my to-do list at the moment...

Aha, found it. It's called Page::print_control_strip(), as it turns out.

Yeah, I was just about to say that the names in the code don't always match the names in the docs. Dreamwidth is turning into one of those Open Source projects that has issues with documenting things properly, either for users or for developers. Anyway, you found it faster than I had time to explain this to you, so.

I still found the name by searching for "navigation strip" on the S2 wiki; the names may be different but they show up close together in the code, so it's easy enough to follow the clues and end up in the right place :-)

FWIW, I use both LJArchive and ghewgill's ljdump Python script. (Though I hacked at it a tad at first - partly because it broke on Windows if icon keywords contained certain "bad" characters when it tried to convert the keyword to a filename, and partly because I didn't want it to backup userpics every single time, since that takes pretty long, since it always downloads the entire lot since it can't tell which ones are new.)

However, I haven't tried to get either of them to speak to Dreamwidth so I can't say whether that would work or whether the API has changed too much. Worth a try, I suppose.

LJArchive speaks to DW just fine. But as far as I can tell there's no way to modify its timeout limit. A friend of mine, pseudomonas, wrote a script that would go through LJ posts and replace each one with a link to the imported post on DW. So I imported my entire LJ in order to test it, and this had two unfortunate effects, firstly that I couldn't get Pseudomonas' script to compile at all, even in an apparently identical environment. And secondly doing this made my DW journal too big for the program to cope with; it times out at 30 minutes and there doesn't seem to be any way to get it to do a smaller range at a time.

I'll see if I can get the Python script you mention to work, cos I feel uncomfortable with half a year of DW only existing in the cloud!

OK, I'm not able to get ljdump to work on DW; it's rejecting the password although I'm pretty certain I entered it correctly. It may be that someone more techy than me could tweak it to work; I don't think DW has changed its API that much.