More information on Friends feed, plus paid account information.

[astronewt]

This post is to provide some additional information on further updates that are yet to be made to the new Friends page feed, several of which address the biggest points of concern that have been expressed. I'm sorry that this 'what's yet to come' information wasn't in the post here yesterday, but we wanted to follow-up as quickly as we could to

Comments

[markf]

Once the new friends feed is out of Beta testing, it will no longer be possible to switch back to using other style-based friends pages like there are now.

[ceilidh]

Once the new friends feed is out of beta, I'm going to stop using Live Journal, because I think it's hideous and unnecessary.

[jiangyin]

This. NOBODY wants this. And yet you're forcing us to put up with it anyway. It's complete bullshit.

I predict that Dreamwidth will be flooded with new users soon. And I fully intend to be one of them. Hope you're happy, LiveJournal - you're about to lose a hell of a lot of loyal users. Lovely to see that NINE YEARS of membership counts for shit!

[ladyvox]

+1

[lysanatt]

+2

Do. Not. Want.

[duskwuff]

I use a custom S2 style to generate an RSS feed directly from my friends page. What are my options going forward?

[andy]

Seeing that you're a paid account holder, you have an RSS feed available for your Friends page at http://duskwuff.livejournal.com/data/rss_friends.

[foxfirefey]

Thank you so much for this tip! I know somebody else who does the same thing, and they are sure to be pleased.

[duskwuff]

Whoa. I totally didn't know that existed.

All the dates are showing up as "Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT", though, which kind of limits its utility.

[andy]

It seems to be a bug and you should report it to Support if you have time!

[duskwuff]

Done!

[syntheticjesso]

Wait, so you can read your friends page through an RSS read, like Google Reader? How do you do this magic?

[duskwuff]

It involves a custom S2 layer, a bunch of XSLT, and some custom scripts to glue it all together. Ugly, in short, and I'm not at all sure you could get Google Reader to use it without a bunch of extra duct tape.

Aside from the outstanding date issue, which I have an open Support issue for, the rss_friends feed which andy mentioned above is far better than the mess I cooked up.

[syntheticjesso]

I saw the RSS feed thing below after I replied to you. My new goal is to find a way to get it to show me my friends-locked entries in Google Reader.

[duskwuff]

You may be able to do that by specifying the URL as:
http://syntheticjesso:YOURPASSWORDHERE@syntheticjesso.livejournal.com/data/rss_friends
This, of course, means trusting Google Reader with your LiveJournal password. I'm not familiar with Reader, so I don't know how bad of an idea this may be.

[sunshine_flying]

That's not really fair to those of us that don't like it. At least make it a paid user option to switch to the old friends page. Even with customization I fear you're going to lose a lot of customers and users.