This might already exist but if it doesn’t it really needs to.
Here’s the situation. I have friends who use LiveJournal for their blogging. I have an LJ account I use to comment on there but I don’t use it for posting or reading, preferring to use the RSS feeds that every journal and community pumps out and do all my blogworld reading in one place.
Here’s the problem. LiveJournal users tend to use the “friends only” function a fair bit, usually for their more interesting posts. I’m able to read these thanks to my LJ account being “friended” but I never do because I have no clue as to when these hidden secret posts have been posted.
Here’s what I need: Some way of getting notification that a friends only post has been posted. I don’t need the whole post, just a short slug telling me it’s there. Ideally this would be within the normal journal feed. Then I can click through and not miss all the juicy stuff.
Get to work, Lazyweb. Or LiveJournal. Or both.
If you ping http://www.lazyweb.org someone might do it ya know…
Tis done.
How about this OpenID stuff that LJ are mentioning on their login page? (FAQ item here.) Dunno if you can link OpenID and RSS as well in some neat way, but maybe…
LiveJournal exposes an API that might be useful here — though it seems like you’d have to use the getevents command and do some parsing.
Never played with this before, but it’d be an interesting tool. Esp. if combined with a way to sync your LJ to your “real” blog… so that when you post something here it gets posted at LJ (maybe just an excerpt, though) and also tells you when you have new friends-only posts to read.
Hmmm…
So long as you’re using an aggregator which supports HTTP authentication (and most of the good ones like SharpReader and SauceReader do), then you should be able to use the instructions on http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2004/07/reading_protect.html to monitor when a friends-only LJ has updated.
But LJ is a nice place to hide from bloglandia.
:)
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149 explains that you can authenticate via browser cookies if your feed reader supports it or via digest authentication :)
This just occured to me! To read your weblog WE the LJ friends have to go to YOUR website! So stop moaning, moaner! We’re worth it, dammit!
No you don’t! Add this syndicated account to your friends list and all my entries come directly to you within LJ. Jo set this up back in the day and I’m more than happy for it to be there.
To reiterate (since a lot of my LJ chums don’t seem to use it): You don’t have to leave LJ to read my blog – it’s seamlessly turned into a LiveJournal for you.
To avoid getting into a bitch-fest, I’m quite happy to go into LJ to read friends-only posts – I’d just like some notification of when they’ve been posted.
I think I have a solution, based on what folk said in these comments but specifically using this procedure.
It’s slightly long winded at the moment, but in short:
NetNewsWire on my desktop syncs with Bloglines so I can still keep all my feeds in one place and read them when away from ‘puter
I then add password-protected feeds from LJ to NetNewsWire.
And that’s about it.
(I could put the password LJs in Bloglines using the http://username:password@livejournal.com/etc string but I’m not happy with giving them my login password.)
Needs some finessing, and does mean I’m going to have to pay for NNW (no biggie really – it looks worth it), but the principle is working.
I’ve found this annoying, also. Oddly, sometimes friends only posts do show up in my BlogLines, even when I can’t access the posts on LJ without logging in.