Charm is a cross-platform blogging client for:

• LiveJournal (plus DeadJournal, uJournal, etc.)
• Atom API-based sites (Blogger, Movable Type, etc.)
• MetaWeb API-based sites (WordPress et.al.)

Download Charm now! (Version 1.9.2: March 27th, 2013)

You can also download old versions:

• 1.0.1 (11/25/01)
• 1.1.0 (12/23/01)
• 1.2.0 (01/02/03)
• 1.2.1 (01/27/03)
• 1.3.0 (01/29/03)
• 1.4.0 (12/22/03)
• 1.5.0 (11/09/04)
• 1.6.0 (06/13/05)
• 1.7.0 (11/23/05)
• 1.8.0 (09/12/08)
• 1.9.0 (10/16/08)
• 1.9.1 (01/11/09)

Release notes (and a changelog) are also available.

More information can be found on Charm's SourceForge project page.

News, updates, and support can be obtained through the LiveJournal LJcharm community.

• 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 has equal facility across a broad spectrum of blogging platforms. It has full-fledged support for LiveJournal-based sites, but it also supports the Atom API (for Blogger) and the MetaWeb API (for Wordpress, Movable Type, and so on). 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), or to a text-to-HTML converter like Markdown or Textile, 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. It also has the ability to quickly cross-post between multiple journals/blogs.

• 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, and it can invoke external filters to modify the message body.

• 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 set up templates, with default data in each of the fields, along with a default message body.

• 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.

Charm was written for Python 2.3 on a Unix system.

It should work with later versions of Python as well, and is intended to work with Python 1.5 and 1.6 as well. (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 the Python home page to download a copy of Python. (Linux users will probably have Python installed already.)

1.0.0: November 24th, 2001

Initial release.

1.0.1: November 25th, 2001

Fixed some bugs related to editing in journals.

1.1.0: December 23rd, 2001

Support for checkfriends mode, multiple usernames, minor bugfixes, and more.

1.2.0: January 2nd, 2003

New checkfriends (friend updates) polling mode, friend group security, and more.

1.2.1: January 27th, 2003

Charm is now Python 1.5.2-compatible as well.

1.3.0: January 29th, 2003

Charm now has command-line quick-posting capabilities, as well as archival capabilities, as well as a number of other new features and improvements.

1.4.0: December 22nd, 2003

Charm now supports all posting options form the command line.

1.5.0: November 9th, 2004

New administrative console capabilities (friends management, community management, shared journal management, ban management). XMMS music detection. Support of newer LJ client protocol enhancements, such as protocol version 1 (Unicode) and challenge/response authentication.

1.6.0: June 13th, 2005

Synchronization support (automatically download and archive entries), friends group management, per-login journal site selection, comments screening, spellchecking, manual and man pages.