There are people whose blogs I find interesting who I don't think need to know about my personal life.

Yup. That's why I use custom friends groups heavily.

But it's a PITA to custom-lock every single entry.

So yes. I'd really love it if LJ separated the "people I read" and "people who can read me" lists.

The problem with LJ's setup is that friending both adds that person to your reading list, and allows them access to your locked entries. And to me, those two actions don't always go together. There are people whose blogs I find interesting who I don't think need to know about my personal life. (The solution is to add them to my Bloglines roll instead of my LJ friendslist, but it's not ideal.)

Yes. This. And of course filters are a way around that, but they can be cumbersome, if like me, you make basically useless filter names and then have to go look through to see who is on it, and then have to decide if you want to share the personal thing with all those people.

I usually get over my need to post the private stuff before I feel like creating a new filter.

I think you can group lj friends, and then make your friendslocked entries only accessible to those in certain groups. So you could have a "read 'em, but don't wanna tell 'em about my love life" group and a "TMI buddies" group and so on.

You can do that with filters, but it can get complicated.

For me, the distinction between basic friendslocking and not is ... am I using full (first) names, or talking about krav in a way that makes it simple to identify the real people ... am I talking about work in a less than cheery way ... do I want my parents to be able to read this ...

It's all approximation anyway.

I imagine no one reads my blog for long without recognising me. I'm that diverse and exciting in subject matter.

Jessica, I think you can group lj friends, and then make your friendslocked entries only accessible to those in certain groups. So you could have a "read 'em, but don't wanna tell 'em about my love life" group and a "TMI buddies" group and so on.

This is what I do. I don't friendslock as a general rule, but I almost never do just the basic lock. I have a handful of groups, and the ones that see use are the "Internet Ax Murderers," which is mostly buffistas, and a general RL group that usually only gets used if we're trying to plan something.

Next on the gay agenda....

...full contact nightgown wrestling.

t /random Right, like that ever closes.

Oh, Stephanie, insent to your profile address.

Betsy and others who tend to friend whatever they're interested in reading, how do you keep up? I've had a problem, mostly with lj communities rather than individuals, when the posting volume gets too high, and I end up unfriending. I wish you could have custom friends pages for reading as well as posting, really. If the groups and communities came up on a separate page, I could go for them when I had the time, but not otherwise. Would help with the work-safe issue, too.

I go through spurts where I remain in the communities, but remove them from my fl. They get cumbersome. When I was in a fanfic drabble community, it drove me mad.

Brenda, with communities, you can either choose to not see a specific community's entries on your Friendslist (I think you set it up that way when you join the community), or you can fiddle with your code and set it so that you don't see ANY of your communities on your Friendslist.

Sometimes I like the fake name thing...if you know me, you know, but my livejournal name is something only my intimates know and use. But there is a lot of stuff that is too personal to post.