LiveJournal syndication

LiveJournal has a recurring problem in dealing with syndicated feeds that I can’t quite figure out – under certain circumstances, it decides that all the items in a feed are new even though they have had absolutely no updates. The net effect of this is that for any users that added that syndication to their friends list, the last 10 posts jump to the top of their friends page. Since it only shows 20 items per page, this can knock any actual new posts from other friends back several pages, which is incredibly annoying. I don’t know why it is doing this, and I apologize to the half dozen or so people that subscribe that way. I don’t know how to fix it and since I can’t guarantee how often it may happen, I would recommend you not use LiveJournal for this purpose (basically, remove this feed from your friends list). I’d love to completely remove this feed from LiveJournal, but strangely they don’t allow that even though I initially added it (though I guess I could block their user-agent if they use one).

If you are in fact interested in tracking updates to this site, please use my main feed URL directly. I think most of the people that subscribe through LJ are personal friends and so aren’t too interested in the tech stuff, so you could also just subscribe to my personal posts if you prefer. Again, sorry for all that, but LJ really sucks in this regard.

Comments and responses

Have you written a response to this? Let me know the URL:

I’d suggest that you use the livejournal crossposter plugin and simply set up an account at livejournal, with the comments link coming here - that’s what I do.

I’m here trying to get some openID action working on my K2 WP blog, by the way, and saw a LJ related post. I want openID commenting so that my LJ friends can comment, you see.