LiveJournal Syndication Update

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on July 27, 2005). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Allrighty then…it wasn’t the solution that I was hoping for, but I think I’ve managed to fumble my way through a solution for my issues with the woody_eclectic LiveJournal feed.

Thanks to a comment from qweltor, I found out that there’s simply no way to disable comments on a LiveJournal syndication feed — they’re just on, like it or not. So, not only wouldn’t there be a way for anyone to go in and turn off the comments for the existing feed, but there wouldn’t be a point to my going in and creating a new feed account. That handily blew all of my already-conceived plans out of the water.

So, I ended up coming up with a new plan. And I do love it when a plan comes together…

The woody_eclectic syndication account pulls its feed from /eclecticism/index.rdf, as this was where my primary feed lived at the time the account was set up. Since then, though, I’d switched over to using the Feedburner service, so there really wasn’t anything at /eclecticism/index.rdf for LJ (or anyone else) to access. Rather, any requests for that file were being redirected over to the corresponding Feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eclecticism.

This was exactly the key that let me proceed with a relative minimum of hassle.

I created a new RSS 2.0 template in MovableType that would output to /eclecticism/index.rdf, and tweaked the template to produced a specialized feed specifically for LiveJournal to syndicate. This feed carries the full content of every post (even the extended entry, something that I haven’t included in even the normal full-content feed). Additionally, there are two blocks of text included in the feed that aren’t in any of the others.

At the end of each post, I’ve included the following message:

Attention: Comments left on this post in LiveJournal will not be seen by me! If you’d like to leave a comment (and please, feel free!), please do so on the original post on my weblog. Thanks much!

The other thing I wanted to be sure I took care of was people who might have started subscribing to me before I moved over to Feedburner. There’s a good chance that their aggregators will still be subscribed to the eclecticism/index.rdf address, and have just been following my webserver’s redirect over to Feedburner ever since I put that in. So, I’ve also included the following text at the beginning of every post:

(Note: This is a specialized feed produced for LiveJournal syndication. If you are receiving this feed outside of LiveJournal, please redirect your subscription address to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eclecticism — thanks!)

I may take that notice out after a few weeks, or move it down to the end of the post so it’s not prepending every post that LiveJournal syndicates, but I wanted to make sure that it was nice and visible for now, so that anyone who needs to make the switch to the Feedburner address can do it.

And with that, I think we’re set. Obviously, this won’t prevent anyone from leaving comments on the LiveJournal syndication pages, but with any luck, it will at least greatly decrease the number of times that it happens. At this point, I’ve done just about everything I can, I think.

iTunesContent” by BT from the album ESCM (1997, 11:01).

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