Yes, this post’s title invokes and evokes rule 1 of the Blog­donts that sub­sti­tute posted years ago:

1.  [Do not] announce your depar­ture or hia­tus to the world. “Good­bye my Inter­net Friends For­ever” is always a mis­take. If you want to leave or go on a break, just do so. When you announce it, peo­ple feel that you’re beg­ging for com­pli­ments. Also, if you don’t absolutely mean it, you look like a total idiot when you come back the next day and post that “What Poke­mon are you” quiz. And if you’re try­ing to avoid evil stalk­ers, you just gave them free infor­ma­tion; don’t ever do that!

The real­ity of things is that I have not looked at my Live­Jour­nal friends page since Octo­ber 5th.  This is not through con­scious deci­sion (“good­bye, my LJ friends for­ever!”), but mainly due to con­ve­nience, work­flow, and wan­ing inter­est.  That’s not to say that I am dis­in­ter­ested in what folks have to say over there — I just do not always think about it and when I do, it almost doesn’t seem worth the effort of log­ging in, nav­i­gat­ing around, and read­ing the large back­log of missed posts.  I am not giv­ing up on Live­Jour­nal; I just find that it is less and less rel­e­vant to my interests.

I started writ­ing about my life in this thing called “a blog,” short for “web log,” back in August of 2001 after being intro­duced to the con­cept by burn­ingskyz.  It caught on like wild­fire in my social group.  We all joined Live­Jour­nal and wrote about all vari­ety of things.  As RSS became more mature, I started using my journal’s friend list as a way of read­ing other blogs.  Even­tu­ally, I got myself a proper RSS reader and migrated those feeds out of Live­Jour­nal — split­ting my read­ing time between reader and jour­nal.  These days, my online read­ing time is mainly split between Google Reader and Twit­ter, with a touch of Face­book on the side. After toy­ing with LiveJournal’s poorly thought out OpenID imple­men­ta­tion (flawed in that I could read pro­tected entries but not com­ment on them), my online writ­ing moved com­pletely to my site (syn­di­cated to LJ via brianenigma_rss).  LJ read­ing and writ­ing sim­ply dropped by the wayside.

I have sub­scribed to a few people’s jour­nals with Google Reader, which is nice but not a com­plete replace­ment for read­ing Live­Jour­nal.  One of the fea­tures that is unique to LJ — and used by many of my friends — is the abil­ity to post things as friend-locked entries. Obvi­ously, these do not appear in the RSS feed, and so I never see them in Google Reader.  I know of no easy way around this.  A cou­ple of months ago, some­one posted a squir­rely lit­tle Perl script to JWZ’s jour­nal that gets an RSS feed of all of your friends (not the default group or other sub-groups, but every­thing).  The out­put of that script would then have to be a public-ish RSS feed for Google Reader to ingest, and that com­pletely sub­verts the con­cept of posts being friend-locked by mak­ing them pub­lic enough for Google to see.  Given the choice of turn­ing people’s friend-locked entries to pub­lic (in a hid­den feed some­where, but still tech­ni­cally pub­lic) and sim­ply not read­ing LJ via Reader, I am choos­ing the latter.

So that is my long-winded way of say­ing Live­Jour­nal has got­ten old and while I have not com­pletely given up on it yet, the real­ity is that is has been a month and a half since I looked at it.  Good­bye, my Live­Jour­nal friends for another month and a half.  See you in the new year.

✻ ✼ ✻

P.S. If some­one really does know how to get LJ friend groups, includ­ing pro­tected entries, into Google Reader, then you are an amaz­ing per­son and must share this infor­ma­tion post-haste!  Mainly, I am look­ing for a solu­tion with the fol­low­ing features:

• Allows me to view pro­tected entries within Google Reader, prefer­ably with an indi­ca­tor that the post is pub­lic ver­sus protected
• Doesn’t require me to divulge a pass­word in plain­text (for instance, within a URL para­me­ter that can be seen in proxy logs, in OPML exports, or handed over to a 3rd party server/service)
• Under­stands Live­Jour­nal groups.  I have groups defined on LJ for Cal­i­for­nia, PDX, ARGs, and what­not.  As I dis­cover and add new peo­ple on LJ, I really do not want to have to man­u­ally add them to the right groups on both LJ and Google Reader.  I know myself and know I’ll for­get an update.  They will quickly get out of sync.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. LJProxy: From friend-locked Live­Jour­nal posts to Google Reader
2. Live­Jour­nal and OpenID
3. Digg Top Sto­ries -> RSS
4. Google RSS Webu­la­tion Thinger

Tagged as: livejournal, rss, rule6