protected friends RSS aggregator

[c3w]

Announcing v1 of LJFriendFeeder [source]

Aggregates your Friends protected entries as an RSS feed

Uses pass-through HTTP Auth for moderate security

Displays User Pics and Lock/Protected icons

Uses Public LJ StyleID 665688

You can run it directly, or copy the source to your own server. Only requirement is PHP w/ Curl compile-time option.

Have fun!--

Comments

[xb95]

Or you could use:

http://c3w.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest

That's supported in just about every feed reader out there - it will realize that the content is protected, prompt for a username and password, and then LJ will consider you 'logged in' for fetching...

[c3w]

LJ's own rss cgi is for reading your own protected entries, while LJFriendFeeder reads your friends protected entries. I've submitted a feature request to LJ, but do not have a timeline on implementation.

So.. LJFriendFeeder lives;)

[xb95]

Woah woah woah.

I work for LJ. We are not planning to implement that. We do not want to see one user syndicating everybody else's content under their name/path/etc. I am one of the people that do not want to see my content get syndicated out anywhere except through my journal.

This is really playing with fire...

[c3w]

i totally agree.. i'm hoping people heed my warnings and use this in a very controlled environment..

an idea:
a 2nd LJ user password that's restricted to view only poster/subject/link. when a user syndicates, they use this limited password to get the links, and must be logged in with their primary password to read the actual content in their local browser.

[iamrobertsworry]

how would lj break your current script?

[clayfoot]

Huh. I wrote some perl scripts to do the same thing a long time ago, but they were just too slow to tolerate. I kept hoping LJ would give me a syndicated friends feed, since it would be so much faster at the source.

[hotabay]

You already are in syndication:
http://xb95.livejournal.com/data/rss

So unless you can turn that off, what's the difference?

[xb95]

Why can nobody actually read?

I don't want my content syndicated under somebody else's name/path. What appears on xb95.livejournal.com is mine. What appears on hotabay.livejournal.com is yours. If my posts appear on hotabay.livejournal.com, we have a problem.

[nearfar]

then let it appear on livejournalfeeds.com/342524

[c3w]

i really don't want my private posts to end up cached across the net because my friend posted a protected link to an aggregator.. this can already happen with LJs RSS (http://user:pass@ etc etc); I think the broader question is how to protect your private information across the net at large.. at a high level I'm thinking of some sort of cascading authentication, or maybe there is already a solution to this problem (?)

[pseudomonas]

Yes, this would be my worry, too. It's not terribly responsible.