[Previous entry: "Doctors don't have superhuman strength?"] [Next entry: "No reason for reason"] October 10, 2007: Hello to all the people arriving from search engines looking for ways to read private LiveJournal entries when you are not authorised to do so.

This software will NOT help you do that. Stop trying to violate other people's right to privacy.

With exams over, I finished the last feature of a small project I have been working on for a little while, but never got around to packaging up - the LiveJournal Basic to Digest Authentication Proxy, which sounds much better as ljbd.py.

I like to read all my friends' LiveJournals from within an RSS reader. However, many of them like to lock their posts against unauthenticated users. As I couldn't find an RSS reader that would support digest authentication as required by LiveJournal.com, I wrote a small CGI script that accepts basic/unencrypted (or, if you really want, hard-coded) credentials and passes back the RSS from LiveJournal.com, complete with protected entries.

There were a couple of interesting quirks, and it comes complete with a patched copy of Python's urllib2 to work around a bug in the LiveJournal server software.

It's available for download at http://zanchey.ucc.asn.au/software/ljbd/. You may be able to tell from the coding style that I am not much of a programmer! Patches are welcome - in particular, I found it astonishingly difficult to express myself clearly in the README. I'm sure the hour of the day has nothing to do with this!

4 comments

Trent :: Tuesday, November 14th

I needed something exactly like this. Thanks, Zanchey!

Nat :: Tuesday, November 14th

How hard would it we to hack private lj entries?

Shnoog :: Friday, November 17th

Sup ZANCHEEEEEY

Mule :: Friday, March 2nd

this isnt working for me. Im getting this error....

Error parsing RSS XML: Not a valid xml document: Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.