You can syndicate LJ posts with a specific tag attached by adding "tag=tagname" to the RSS feed URL's query part.

I just set The Gameshelf's blip-blog (cough) feed URL to http://prog.livejournal.com/rss?tag=the+gameshelf, and it works great; you can read all my gameshelf-tagged posts (and only those posts) on the show's blip page. Cool. This saves me from spinning off an entirely new LJ just for the show.

Of course you also end up reading whatever today I ate a ham sandwich stuff that I mash into the same blog posts, but that's fine.

I posted the 10-minute proto-episode I made in June as my certification tape, and which aired in July. Also crappy, but apparently interesting enough that strangers recognized me and were asking me about it when mrmorse and I were last visiting the studio.

Also, if you're a Mac user, I can recommend a better way of watching the show than futzing with BitTorrent: give DTV a whirl. Once you have it running (which, unlike BM, is very easy), click the "Add Channel" button and then give it this URL: http://www.jmac.org/gameshelf/bm/rss.php?i=1 (That's the same link you get from the wee orange RSS buttons throughout the existing Gameshelf site.)

DTV uses BitTorrent and RSS transparently to fetch show information and download episodes, and a TiVo-like keep-until-it-gets-old syetem to manage the resulting files. Here is a screenshot of it in action. Pretty slick. They say a Windows version is coming out soon.

Again, if you try it, please let me know if it works or not. I'm new to being on the serving end of all this and appreciate the feedback. DTV makes a lot of things transparent but it isn't perfect; feedback I've received so far suggests that some firewall configurations can cause problems.

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I feel I was a little too harsh on the BM/DTV people yesterday. Their projects have the potential to be pretty revolutionary, and I can't fault them for not having all the kinks worked out just yet. Some of the BM programming is kind of insane (magic numbers abound) but I still appreciate what they're doing, and look forward to its future development.