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.
In Newsgator outlook edition this doesn’t seem to work.
But… if you set up a feed to http://ljuser.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest, then click on the Credentials tab, check the Network Credentials box, tick the Use Specific Credentials radio button and then fill in your LJ username and password, leaving the domain blank, it seems to work.
Thanks for the info. I haven’t tried the Outlook edition left, but hopefully this will help anyone who stumbles upon this entry.