RSS Aggregator for Livejournal Protected posts
Here is how to set your RSS news reader to read Protected (Friends-Only) posts.
I mention this because I had some trouble getting this to work with the available instructions out there.
This is tested on RSS Bandit.
Create a new feed entry with a URL like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace “YourFriend’sUsername” with… I’ll let you guess)
Go to the Authentication tab and type in your Livejournal username and password.
Done :-) You can now use that feed entry to read your friend’s posts.
I read in several places that you should do this:
http://Username:Password@www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace Username, Password and YourFriend’sUsername)
I haven’t found this to work.
Now if I could only get the LiveJournal feed to work on Yahoo 360! I know I’m using the right one, because it works as a bookmark on Firefox. But when I put it into my Yahoo 360 feeds, it mysteriously never shows anything.
Remember that since your feed is Protected/Friends-only, you can see it in Firefox. If you log out of your Livejournal account, you won’t be able to see your posts.
I have things set up so that I am always logged in to LiveJournal. Nevertheless, if I try to add http://www.livejournal.com/users/free_of_whip/data/rss?auth=digest to my Yahoo 360 feeds, I get an error message. If I try to add http://www.livejournal.com/users/free_of_whip/data/rss to my Yahoo 360 feeds, I don’t get an error message–but none of the posts (not even the public ones) show up.
When you are logged in, actually it’s your browser that is logged in because of the cookie it has gotten from Livejournal. If you switch to Internet Explorer, you’ll notice that you’re not logged in. Likewise, your Yahoo 360 account is browsing from a different computer… some computer in the Yahoo 360 office. Since that computer isn’t logged in, there is a problem.
It’s possible that you won’t be able to convince the Yahoo 360 computer to log in so that you can read the protected posts. You’ll have to give your username/password to Yahoo 360 and hope they use it correctly to log in. It’s possible their computer isn’t smart enough to log in. That’s a feature that the Yahoo 360 people might (or might not) have built into their service.
What’s odd is that Yahoo 360 can’t pick up the feed–even of public posts–when I use http://www.livejournal.com/users/free_of_whip/data/rss. That URL should not require a log-in. However, I’d agree that the problem is with Yahoo’s RSS reader, not LiveJournal itself.