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|                                                                           |
|    CHARM - A LiveJournal and Atom API client for Python
|
|    Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Lydia Leong
|    Open Source:  GNU General Public License
|                                                                           |
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FEATURES

- Charm is an entirely text-based client. Consequently, its system and
  hardware requirements are negligible; you just need something that
  supports the Python interpreter.

- Charm's primary function is as a client for LiveJournal-based sites.
  However, it also has beta-level support for sites that utilize the
  Atom API, such as Blogger. Atom support requires that you have the
  Feedparse module from http://feedparser.org/ installed.

- Charm contains four major utilities in a single client: menu-driven
  posting/editing, "quick" command-line posting, archival, and
  friends-checking.

- Normal, menu-driven mode. Charm uses menus of single-letter commands,
  and is thus easy to use. There's a full array of post and edit options.

- "Quick" mode. Command-line-only, reading the body of the post from
  stdin. This allows very fast posting for casual use. But it also
  allows input to be piped to a post or taken from an arbitrary file,
  for filter-like uses. Thus, you could take some text, pipe it to the
  Enchefferizer (the "Swedish chef" text converter) and that pipe that
  to Charm for posting to your journal. 

- Friends-checking tool. Background polling mode for friend updates,
  displayed like the Unix 'newmail' utility. It can check all friends,
  or just specific friend groups. Even if you don't use Charm for
  anything else, you might find this useful.

- Mass archiving. This is part of Charm's menu-driven mode. You can
  download and save part or all of your journal or a community. This
  is another useful standalone feature, particularly since you can set
  up your computer to automatically synchronize your offline archive
  with your online journal on a nightly basis.

- Charm handles multiple usernames and shared journal access, including
  handling profiles for non-LiveJournal accounts (like DeadJournal).
  Passwords can optionally be stored/sent as a MD5 hash.

- Charm has a full set of features for editing and posting. Anything you
  can do from the LiveJournal posting and editing Web pages, you can do
  from Charm. Charm can also use an external spellchecker.

- You can select moods, journals, picture keywords, friend groups, tags,
  etc. from menus. Unlike other console-based clients, you don't have to
  type these in; you just pick an option number from a menu.

- Charm supports XMMS-based music detection, if you have the PyXMMS
  module from http://www.via.ecp.fr/~flo/ installed.

- You can save, and later resume working on, an entry-in-progress.
  You can also save an entry while your computer is offline, and then
  quickly post it when you get back online.

- You can select online entries to edit in a flexible manner: most
  recent, last N entries, and by date. Choosing entries by date brings up
  a calendar of the chosen month, showing the number of posts each day.

- When you post something, there's an option to archive it; you can also
  optionally archive edits made to posts already online. The archive
  organization is configurable; you can put all posts in one directory,
  use subdirectories for each year, and use subdirectories for each
  month (under subdirectories for each year).

- Charm fully supports listing, adding, removing, and editing friends and 
  friends groups.

- Charm supports the LiveJournal administrative console commands, so
  you can use it to manage community membership, manage posting access
  to shared journals, and manage user bans.

- Charm respects Unix environment variables for default programs.

- Charm has proxy support. Python supports proxies transparently; just set
  your HTTP_PROXY environment variable to proxyhost:portnumber.


GETTING STARTED

A manual has been included with this distribution. Read the "charm.html"
file in a browser for extensive details on how to install and use Charm.

For help, type:  charm --help
Normally, type:  charm

Also, look at sample.charmrc and make a .charmrc file in your home
directory.

A minimal .charmrc file for LiveJournal contains the line:
    login = yourusername yourpassword
(Fill in your own LiveJournal username and password.)

A minimal .charmrc file for Blogger contains the line:
    blogger = yourusername yourpassword
(Fill in your own Blogger username and password.)


WHERE TO FIND MORE INFORMATION

Charm's home page is at http://ljcharm.sourceforge.net/

There, you can read the Charm manual and other documentation, download
the latest version, and find links to the Charm LiveJournal community 
and other support resources.


INSTALLATION

If you wish to do so, you can just run Charm directly out of the directory
that you unpacked it into, or wherever else you care to place the
necessary files (charm, and ljcharm.py).

However, if you have access to do so (on Unix systems, this will generally
require root privileges), and you either have at least Python 1.6 or the
Distutils module installed, you can install Charm in your main Python
modules directory, using "python setup.py install".

For more information, see Charm's manual (included as charm.html).


COMPATIBILITY

Charm was written for Python 2.3 on a Unix system.

It should work with later versions of Python as well, and is likely to
work with Python 1.5 and 1.6 also. (If you encounter problems that
seem version-specific, please email the author.)

Because Charm is written in Python, it should be reasonably cross-platform.
It should work on any Unix-based system (including Linux). It is likely to
work on Windows, and it will probably work on the Macintosh. (Again, 
please email the author with portability problems.)

Of course, you will need to have Python installed on your machine.
See http://www.python.org/ to download a copy of Python. (Linux users
will probably have Python installed already.)


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|                                                                           |
|    Please email the author at evilhat@livejournal.com with any
|    comments, suggestions, and bug reports.
|                                                                           |
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