F-List By Stealth // VOID-STAR.NET

I think I have developed a new vice; lurking in people’s journals. Not blogs, but journals.

See, invariably, whenever I subscribe to someone’s blog via RSS, I end up reading two or three of their entries and skimming the rest. The occasional interesting post buried in the quagmire of life stories and long-winded, mediocre writing.¹ I can count the number of personal blogs I actually read seriously on the fingers of one hand… well, maybe two, but anyway it’s not a lot. It’s certainly a hell of a lot more than the number of personal blogs I subscribe to.

But there’s something about journals. Some different style to the writing that appeals to me. Shorter, generally. More honest. Less pandering. I dunno, something.

So I started reading other people’s friends lists. It felt like such a dirty thing to do, too. Not even necessarily my friends’ friends lists, but complete randoms with interests or personalities I found appealing. I kept thinking, “What am I doing?” And then, because at heart I’m a lifehacker, “How can I make this more efficient?”

I think a lot of people still don’t realise it, but all LJ Server based journals have RSS feeds; just append /data/atom to the end of their main journal page (like so). You can actually even read your friends’ locked posts via these feeds if you use URIs in the format of http://you:password@username.livejournal.com/data/atom?auth=digest.² These feeds plus my procrastination plus Google Reader make a potent combination… but how to bulk import someone’s entire f-list?

What you need is a text editor that can do a find-replace on an end of line character. UltraEdit‘s my weapon of choice, and I do believe that Word will actually do this as well. So I start copy-pasting people’s f-lists from their profile pages and with a couple of find-replace queries across line endings format these lists as OPML files. These can then get bulk-imported into GReader, and viola! Next step? Doing the same thing for the ‘Similar Users’ lists at IJ and JF (alas, LJ has theirs turned off). Or communities I like the sound of.

Google is every obsessive-compulsive’s best friend, and its Trends page will happily report on things like journals that have never been updated (usually indicating something f-locked) and it will even try and give you percentages on how many items from a feed you’ve read (I’m not entirely sure how it works this out). It’s like creepy journal-stalking taken to a whole new level.

The obvious question is why do it this way in the first place. Why not just add people to my f-list like a normal person? Well, because my f-list is, in fact, for my friends. And there’s that thing, you know, where friending someone creates like this obligation that they friend you in return? And then they do, and then six months later when you realise that they’re actually a tosser and you’d rather gouge your own eyes out than continue to read their journal but you don’t want to, like, offend them by taking them off your list. So then you’ve got the complication of the Default View Shuffle but they can still read your f-locked posts so then you make a bunch of custom groups and—

Look, all that social obligation stuff is way too stressful. I just want to read some journals, man.

Just pretend I’m not here.

1. Yeah yeah yeah. I know. Bite me. ^
2. Though not, it must be mentioned, in all readers. Google Reader doesn’t, most desktop readers — including Mail and Thunderbird — do. ^