feed proxy

From Feed Proxy To FreeMyFeed

As those of you who use my Feed Proxy service to get your LiveJournal friends’ blogs (including friends-only posts) into Google Reader or a similar service know, the service hasn’t been working for the last few days.

I made all of the changes that LiveJournal’s bot policy required of me. I e-mailed them; no response. I e-mailed again; no response. I e-mailed to ask were they receiving my e-mails – yes, they were, but the person responsible for unblocking the bot “wasn’t in” at the moment.

I e-mailed again: yet again, no response.

I’ve been finding it harder to keep up with my LiveJournal friends because of this, and I know that a lot of you are pissed off, too. But it looks like LiveJournal aren’t going to be cooperative any time soon. So it’s time to switch services.

I’m moving my authenticated feeds over to FreeMyFeed. FreeMyFeed provides many of the same services at Feed Proxy did, although it also works for a wider variety of web applications (for example, you can also use it for Twitter, if you’re one of the dozen or so people who still uses Twitter).

If you’re already a Feed Proxy user:

Within the next few hours, each LiveJournal friend you’re subscribed to through Feed Proxy will produce a post explaining how you can convert their feed over to FreeMyFeed with about two clicks. I suggest that you mark that post as “read” and then click the link, and the rest of the work is mostly done for you. You’ll see some “read” posts all over again (boo!) and FreeMyFeed doesn’t convert LJ “moods” and “comment counts” for you automatically, but apart from that it should serve you well.

If you’re not using Feed Proxy or FreeMyFeed yet, or you’ve deleted your Feed Proxy-powered feeds from Google Reader:

Google Reader’s a great way to keep up-to-date with all your friends’ blogs – as well as with news, comics, and more – both in and out of LiveJournal. To subscribe to a LiveJournal blog in Google Reader or a similar service, friends-only posts and all, go to the FreeMyFeed website and enter into the boxes:

feed url: http://username.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace username with the LiveJournal username of the person whose LiveJournal you’re subscribing to)

user: your LiveJournal username

pass: your LiveJournal password

Thanks for all of the support you LiveJournalers have given me over the years, both for Feed Proxy and for it’s predecessor, LiveJournal-To-Google Reader. It’s been fun.

Feed Proxy Bug Fixes

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.

LiveJournal-To-Google Reader Back Up

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.

The LiveJournal-To-Google Reader service is back up again, rebranded as Feed Proxy. It’s pretty much bare-bones right now, but I’ve got a meaningful framework that I can add to in the future, and I’ll try to keep it up-to-date by adding all of the features that everybody requested back when it was LiveJournal-To-Google Reader (I’ve already added a few, as described below).

My sincere apologies to everybody affected by the day and a half of downtime that was involved in this change-over.

Here’s what you need to know:

If you already use LiveJournal-To-Google Reader

All of your feed links have now broken. Sorry, but this was necessary! You’ll probably want to delete your subscriptions to all of the old links, because they won’t work any more. You’ll also need to set yourself up with a new account on the new service, Feed Proxy. Choose yourself a username and password, log in, and associate your account with your LiveJournal account. Then you can click “show feeds” and start subscribing to your LiveJournal friends’ feeds using Google Reader.

New features:

Where possible, shows how many comments, link to comments, poster’s “mood”, and security status (public or private [i.e. “friends only”]) of each post.
OPML export, so you can easily get all of your feeds back into Google Reader (or whatever RSS reader you prefer) again.
Links that don’t change for no reason
Better support for communities

If you don’t have a clue what this is all about…

Feed Proxy is a tool that I originally wrote because I didn’t like having to go to my LiveJournal “friends page” to catch up on all the “friends-only” posts being made by people I knew. I already used Google Reader for every other blog in the world; why should I have to go to another site? I also didn’t like that I couldn’t “group” my friends on my friends page, so I could see which ones were related to my different interests and just focus on those at once. I also wanted to be able to easily mark which posts I’d already read. Google Reader already does all of this.

But if you subscribe to a LiveJournal account using Google Reader, you don’t get the “friends only” posts. It’s just not possible.

Feed Proxy makes it possible. And now, it adds a lot of other nice features, too.

If you use LiveJournal (or your friends use LiveJournal) and you’d rather have the slicker interface of Google Reader at your disposal, give it a go.

If you want to hear about updates…

Please subscribe to this RSS feed of Feed Proxy-tagged posts on my blog.