Day: January 26, 2006

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m now using FeedDemon to successfully read my friends’ LiveJournals – even ones that are friends-only. You may wonder why I refuse to just use the Friends page for my account, but I assure you that it’s more than just laziness. It is contempt! The setup of the Friends page is awkward and annoying to me, and causes me to miss a lot of posts. Paging back to catch up with things from yesterday because another person decided to write 10 entires today is rather irritating.

Using FeedDemon for all of my feed reading makes it far easier to switch between reading everybody on LJ, or just checking out one person – and I don’t miss anything I don’t want to. I’ve already been able to catch up on things people wrote weeks ago, but slipped through the cracks. Especially those whose journals are friends-only, period. I’m not complaining about how much any of my friends write, or those who wish to keep their journal private. On the contrary, I think that’s just fine and dandy – but the LJ interface feels so primitive even for someone with only 20 people on their list.

Anywho, for those who want to try this out, I’ve got this working with FeedDemon and the complementary NewsGator Online service, although the setup can only be done directly in FeedDemon. To start with, the new subscription must be created in a folder that is not synchronizing with NewsGator. Create a new subscription, and enter the URL as http://ljuser.livejournal.com – FD will automatically find the actual feed. Next, go to the “Feed Properties” and change the feed URL to http://username:password@ljuser.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest. Now when you refresh the feed, it will prompt you for the username and password again. I think you can just cancel it, and then restart FeedDemon and all shall be working. You can now also choose to synchronize the folder.

I’m going to post this to the NewsGator Forums, and hopefully that will help the staff figure out how to make this process easier.

For some time now I’ve been struggling to keep up with all of the feeds that interest me. It wouldn’t be a big deal, but that also includes a lot of friends who write on Livejournal – and I’d like to keep up with them. For awhile I’ve used SharpReader, but working on three different computers makes it difficult to sync what I’ve read over the course of the day. So I started to look for alternatives, including some web-based readers. Since it’s initial announcement, feedlounge has peaked my interest as a very likely candidate.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get into the alpha or beta testing, so I continued to use SharpReader with varying degrees of success. Now that feedlounge has gone live, however, the price is keeping me away. I’m not about to diss the service or say that it’s overpriced, but it is more than I want to spend right now – I was hoping it would be in the $25-$30 range. I got an e-mail yesterday saying that I could get a free month since I waited so patiently on the mailing list, so I might give it a try anyway.

In the meantime, though, I’ve begun using FeedDemon (actually the first feed reader I ever used) along with the NewsGator Online service. The synchronization features are still in beta, but the intent is to let you have multiple installs of FeedDemon as well as the web version that will all keep up to date with each other. You can even identify locations so that only the appropriate feeds show up on certain computers.

The interface is different from what I’ve come to expect, but I’m getting more accustomed to the “Surfer”-style interface which places all posts on a continuous display. It’s kind of like a neverending friends page – only far easier to navigate. Plus, I’ve even got it working with “Friends-Only” LJ pages! (More on that later)

Even with all of those features, it’s priced at the $30/year point that I was hoping for. I’ll be giving feedlounge a try, too, but with money getting tighter around here I can’t alway pay the price for the “premium” services anymore.