BREAKING NEWS: On 1st October 2009, LiveJournal blocked the Feed Proxy bot. I don’t know when they’ll unblock it and it’ll come back up: see the latest here.
I’ve fixed a handful of bugs in the popular Feed Proxy tool (which, as you probably know, allows you to read LiveJournal and Dreamwidth “friends-only” posts in Google Reader or your favourite RSS reader tool, even where that RSS reader doesn’t support the necessary authentication systems to normally be able to pick up these posts). These include:
- A number of users identified a problem relating to some mixed-case LiveJournal usernames having to be entered into Feed Proxy in lowercase to work. These usernames are now automatically corrected to lowercase as necessary.
- Feed Proxy now automatically detects those passwords whose characters may cause problems with the cURL library, which is used to fetch the feeds from LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, and produces a warning message, rather than the previous unfriendly error message. A better solution will be investigated in the future.
- Downloading an OPML package of some or all of your feeds now works correctly in Google Chrome. I didn’t know so many of you used it!
- The FAQ has been expanded with a few more common questions, including the (very) frequently-asked question about multiple source accounts of the same type (which will be properly supported at some future point).
- It’s now possible to read the FAQ without having an account or logging in. Sorry I forgot that – whoops!
I’ve finally gotten around to responding to all of the e-mails I’ve received so far from users: sorry about the delay, folks, but a lot of you had questions to ask!
To those that have asked about open-sourcing it: yes, I still fully intend to open-source the project (as I did with it’s predecessor, LJ-To-Google Reader) so you can run it on your own server if you like, but only once it’s reached a point of stability. Follow this RSS feed if you want to hear about updates to Feed Proxy, including when the source code becomes available.
Yes, I noticed 109 new blog entries in my feed reader this morning, going back all the way to last December’s Christmas posts, lol. And then a whole lot of errors. Good luck with that.
Any word on the status of this yet?
Afraid not. =o(
Have adjusted Feed Proxy to hammer LJ a lot less, have complied with all of LJ’s suggestions for bots, and have e-mailed them three times now with no response.
How annoying. Silly LJ
Any progress on this?
I’m wondering too!
Latest news:
LJ continue to ignore my e-mails. The only reply I’ve had from them at all, when I pressured them, was to say that the person who needed to deal with my request wasn’t around at the moment so it’d have to wait a little while. That was over a week ago. I continue to send them e-mails to ask for – at the very least – a confirmation of whether or not the service might ever be allowed to run again.