(Untitled)

[illykai]

I've decided that I'm going to get back into using LJ, but that I'm going to make my journal friends only. I'll probably get around to doing that next week. Today, however, I set my mind to working out how I can get a gadget for iGoogle to display my friends page for me as an RSS feed. These days I have iGoogle as my browser's home page. It's

Comments

[tull]

My brother went a little bit monkey feces over Yahoo Pipes last month. I'm not a fan of RSS so I thought nothing of it, but maybe for ju?

[danoot]

your feed aggregator isn't logged in. Your feed is also public, and anyone can read it, meaning that having the titles and some content of locked posts in it is extremely unadvisable. Yaknow?

[illykai]

People who aren't on the friends list of users that have private posts in my feed shouldn't be able to see those private posts. AFAIK that's what the &auth=digest argument is for. Also, LJ is what is doing the feed aggregation, there is no 3rd party script.

[danoot]

but rss feeds aren't dynamic, in the same way an lj friends-page is. The friends page is generated independently for each user, so if I load up your friends page, I'll see private posts for locks I'm in, but not those which belong to people I don't know. But the rss feed is generated every five minutes, or whatever, then remains static, whoever accesses it gets the same one until it is updated. If it is generated as you, logged in, then it's going to show the titles of updates which are not meant to be visible to some people. I'd say auth=digest is more likely to be the part which publishes the titles and small segments of the posts, rather than any kind of authorisation thing. I could, of course, be wrong, because I haven't read any of it. But basically, your rss is not dynamic and thus shouldn't have any per-user stuff in it.

[illykai]

The RSS feed in this case gets built through a style in LJ, so I don't know how everything works behind the scenes exactly.

Here's what the FAQ says:
Protected Entries: When you view your RSS feed in your browser while logged into LiveJournal, you will see all your recent entries; someone who is not logged in or not on your Friends list cannot see any protected entries in the feed. Users on your Friends list can either log into LiveJournal (cookie authentication) or use HTTP Digest Auth by adding ?auth=digest to the end of the feed URL. If the URL already contains a question mark, add &auth=digest instead.