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.
enough is enough! first you break one set of feeds, now this. damn the day i learned about your ‘service’.
@chuck:
I’d like to stress that they weren’t broken by me this time, but by LiveJournal.
I take it this is “no, I’m not going to release the source” ? :(
Having a problem with the conversion. I click on the button to continue and it tells me invalid username and password.
@Bill:
May still do so; just a little swamped with things right now! Sorry about the delay!
@E. H.:
Sorry to hear that – there’s not a lot I can do about it, though, I’m afraid – best I can do is suggest that you follow the instructions under “If you’re not using Feed Proxy or FreeMyFeed yet, or you’ve deleted your Feed Proxy-powered feeds from Google Reader:” instead.
I no longer have the time to maintain this kind of service while LiveJournal continue to make things difficult. I’ll be stopping new Feed Proxy signups soon and “encouraging” Dreamwidth users to consider switching to FreeMyFeed in the near future, too.
Damn! I moved here from Freemyfeed sometime ago. A good lesson for me: never trust services that don’t even have their own domain…
@Iren:
Really? What was wrong with FreeMyFeed? (I ask because I’m using it now!)
Didn’t see the point in registering a domain for Feed Proxy just yet, plus, I’m skint.
On the other hand, Feed Proxy didn’t fail because it didn’t have it’s own domain name, it failed because LiveJournal are slow at dealing with technical e-mails. Ho hum.
It’s too bad they don’t seem to be giving you a second chance here. This is inconvenient, sure, but the blame isn’t on you. I’m not too keen on jumping to FreeMyFeed yet, because I’m not too crazy about managing my username and password per each feed (tried this with NewsGator and got tired of it), so I’m going to keep hoping that LJ eventually comes ’round to unblocking the FeedProxy bot. If they do that, I am hoping you will be persuaded to keep the project up. The alternatives suck.
Thanks for the service and your hard work in tailoring this to the LJ dilemma. Much appreciated, despite the bumps in the road, and this big effin’ tree that just fell across it.
Thanks for the hard work, Dan. It’s not your fault.
I wonder how I am going to migrate my 290 feeds manually…
PS Since you have our e-mails, it would be probably nice to get back in touch with you when LJ finally gets their wits together.
Honestly, Russians may be splendid programmers but they still mostly suck at management… (I know, I am Russian)
I am glad that you tried, and thank you for your hard work. I was keeping my links in Google Reader even though I’d switched to FreeMyFeed, in case your service came back. Thank you for giving us this info, now I can move on, albeit with sadness.
Thank you for all your hard work on this. Back in the day, I strictly followed LJ friends, and finding your LJ-to-Reader opened up new worlds to me! Now I don’t know how I’d live without my daily dosages of XKCD, Passive-Agressive-Notes, and more! We know that the current situation not your fault, and I appreciate you at least giving a good recommendation about what service we could use next — very helpful especially for non-techies like me!
Livejournal is a love/hate relatioship. I love how you can lock your feeds but I hate how in the past the company is. They used to be so innovative until Six Apart took over and now they don’t give a shit about livejournal users or innovation. They need to learn to move forward or they will just get left behind.
I’m really sorry to hear that they are not being cooperative or communicative. That is really frustrating. I hope this new feed works out. Thanks for providing us with this service otherwise we’d give up on livejournal.
Dan, thanks for all your work and I’ll hope LJ eventually get off their fat arses and sort things. In the meantime I’ll keep the FP links in my Google Reader.
Dare I say LJ unblocked the service? I’m getting updates from some of my feeds, including posts from today.
If this is back up, will you be keeping Feed Proxy up? At least for existing users?
Looks like it’s true. I haven’t heard anything from LJ, but it looks like it’s unblocked.
I’ll be keeping the service running for the forseeable future, certainly.