Along with my limited online presence of late has come an almost indifference to posts by my friends on Livejournal. No, it’s not that I don’t care what you have to say or don’t care about you at all… wait… no, that’s definitely not it. It’s that the Livejournal friends page is absolutely horrendous. If a few people write a bunch of entries one day, I end wasting a bunch of time just trying to figure out where I last left off. And as time goes by, that gets worse and worse.
So my goal had been to read my friends’ Livejournals just like any other decent feed – via Google Reader. The problem is that Google Reader doesn’t support digest authentication, which means that I miss out on any protected posts. And for some people, that would mean pretty much all posts. But along comes Scatman Dan and his wonderful and imaginatively named LiveJournal For Google Reader (now with v1.3 flavoring). This magnificent tool translates the protected LJ feeds into some horribly complicated URL that totally fools Google into displaying all of your personal secrets protected entries. And now I know everything going on in your lives again. W00t indeed!
I even get to rename all of the feeds with your real names so I don’t mix people up – very confusing for some of you married couples! It’s so refreshing to see everything like my other feeds – now if you people would just start writing more. Not that I can complain…