One of the things we've been trying to accomplish since the open beta launch is the ability to read your offsite friends page/reading lists from other LJ-based sites directly on Dreamwidth itself, along with things like locked posts (assuming you have the credentials to read them, of course). It's been a while since we've given you an update on that one, and there's a reason for that -- the project has had a bunch of setbacks. mark actually had working code, and could have committed it at any point in the past, oh, nine months ... except for some factors that meant the near-certainty that the minute we turned it on, LiveJournal will block our access to their servers.
We have been looking for a way to work around that problem -- rate-limiting our queries, further limiting who got access to the feature, even throwing out all the code Mark had written and starting again from scratch, but nothing we did could get around the fact that if we went ahead with the implementation, we'd be almost guaranteed to be blocked from accessing LJ entirely. That would mean not only no more cross-site reading list, but also no importing, no crossposting, and no syndicated feeds from LiveJournal. The past nine months or so have been full of a lot of behind-the-scenes brainstorming on how we could make things work, since we know how much people have been looking forward to the prospect, but nothing has worked and we've hit the bottom of the barrel on other things we can try.
It is with utmost reluctance that I have to announce that unless something changes drastically in the future, we aren't going to be able to offer the cross-site reading list feature after all. We'd rather keep importing, crossposting, and syndicated feeds (and not offer cross-site reading) than not be able to offer any interaction with LJ at all. We are all incredibly sorry about this -- we genuinely thought we'd be able to do it, but some factors changed after we first announced the project and no matter what we try, we can't work around them.
For those who are looking for something that will let you read offsite content that requires you to identify yourself in order to see locked data, our best suggestion is to download a desktop RSS feedreader that supports HTTP authentication. (I don't know of any online feedreader that will do it, but many desktop ones will.)
We are absolutely going to keep this problem in mind, and if the factors that are keeping us from being able to release this feature ever change, or if LJ implements a better way for their users to access their data through the LJ protocol, we will go back to it in a heartbeat.
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One of the things we've been trying to accomplish since the open beta launch is the ability to read your offsite friends page/reading lists from other LJ-based sites directly on Dreamwidth itself, along with things like locked posts (assuming you have the credentials to read them, of course). It's been a while since we've given you an update on that one, and there's a reason for that -- the project has had a bunch of setbacks. mark actually had working code, and could have committed it at any point in the past, oh, nine months ... except for some factors that meant the near-certainty that the minute we turned it on, LiveJournal will block our access to their servers.
We have been looking for a way to work around that problem -- rate-limiting our queries, further limiting who got access to the feature, even throwing out all the code Mark had written and starting again from scratch, but nothing we did could get around the fact that if we went ahead with the implementation, we'd be almost guaranteed to be blocked from accessing LJ entirely. That would mean not only no more cross-site reading list, but also no importing, no crossposting, and no syndicated feeds from LiveJournal. The past nine months or so have been full of a lot of behind-the-scenes brainstorming on how we could make things work, since we know how much people have been looking forward to the prospect, but nothing has worked and we've hit the bottom of the barrel on other things we can try.
It is with utmost reluctance that I have to announce that unless something changes drastically in the future, we aren't going to be able to offer the cross-site reading list feature after all. We'd rather keep importing, crossposting, and syndicated feeds (and not offer cross-site reading) than not be able to offer any interaction with LJ at all. We are all incredibly sorry about this -- we genuinely thought we'd be able to do it, but some factors changed after we first announced the project and no matter what we try, we can't work around them.
For those who are looking for something that will let you read offsite content that requires you to identify yourself in order to see locked data, our best suggestion is to download a desktop RSS feedreader that supports HTTP authentication. (I don't know of any online feedreader that will do it, but many desktop ones will.)
We are absolutely going to keep this problem in mind, and if the factors that are keeping us from being able to release this feature ever change, or if LJ implements a better way for their users to access their data through the LJ protocol, we will go back to it in a heartbeat.
12/24/2010 Weekly Update