Yee-har! The new ECW isn't very good. In fact, whilst 'watching' it, I achieved high-level spoddery, by fiddling with:

How to get your Livejournal Friends Page as a Web Feed

(Web feeds, also known as RSS, described here.)

If you read a lot of Web Feed through LJ and/or often fall behind in reading friend entries, this is nerdvana, as they can now popup in Thunderbird, Google Reader, etc. and can be read like email, or with your other news. Yes, even protected/flocked posts. Here's how:

• Based on http://community.livejournal.com/lj_nifty/119447.html . The instructions seem a bit out of date; the below worked for me.


• http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layers.bml - this is some hopelessly hapless form of style-generation language...
• Create top-level layer. The Type is Layout.


• In the funky programming window, copy and paste in the text from http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layersource.bml?id=2870759&fmt=html


• Press 'Save & Compile', and realise there is no way out of the funky programming window.


• Escape by going to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/styles.bml - create a new style called anything. After you press Create, from the Layout box choose the bottom option (should say 'RSS'). Press Change, and then press Save Changes.


• Go back to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/styles.bml - you should now see your new style. Click on it and check it is a RSS Feed (Firefox says 'Subscribe to this feed').


• You can now use Thunderbird of your favourite RSS reader with this address:


• http://NAME.livejournal.com/friends/?s2id=STYLEID&auth=digest


• e.g. mine is http://vodex.livejournal.com/friends/?s2id=14194083&auth=digest , but you have to create your own for some reason
  


• the 'auth=digest' bit means you login through the RSS reader and get flocked entries; you might want to tick 'Show the Article Summary' as well, to get the text of the article; otherwsie you get a link to the original web page & you'll have to log in to LJ to see it.

Blimey, that's a bit involved, isn't it? It seems you create an style 'layer' that makes RSS instead of purty web pages, which you then make a style out of.

And you can't just use someone else's style layer; you have to create your own, duplicate, one, in a Perl-script-from-1997 kind of way.

Hurrah for spoddery!