Aquarionics

Subscribing to LJ RSS friends only feeds

Every LiveJournal publishes an RSS feed and an Atom feed, except those who are already syndicated accounts. The problem is that the main benefit of LJ beyond something like blogspot is the ability to block off some posts to everyone but your ‘friends’.

Much as I distrust the terminology, this is occasionally useful. So, how do you subscribe to a feed and see the ‘friends’ only posts? Like this:

http://username|password@​www.livejournal.com/​users/​exampleusername/​data/​rss?auth=httpd

Magic.

Don’t, whatever you do, do this in something public like Bloglines, or you’ll be storing stuff other people want private in a database over which you have no control and they have no idea.

+(Incidentally, If you add a feed with a username or username & password to bloglines, it’s set as “Private” so nobody else can see it. It’s still in their database, though, so I suppose it depends on how much you trust Ask Jeeves not to be Evil).+

Observations that the first this is equally true to LJ are normally completely ignored.

edited to replace soft-hypens in the long URL with zero width spaces because Mozilla doesn’t support shy and it breaks the layout. I hate the bazaar model when it means that nobody else cares enough to fix a bug. The relevant bug had it’s fifth birthday recently