I have downloaded and installed the Better Feed plugin, tinkered with it a little. I hope it will encourage my LiveJournal readers to come to my blog rather than commenting on the syndicated feed on LiveJournal. I don’t get any notifications if comments are made there, so with any luck this will include a link, both to say how many comments there are so far, and to direct readers here to make a comment.

Suzie has been taken to Southampton. The journey was a bit stressful, but i am confident that Suzie will settle down and be very happy with my friend for two weeks. Everything is in order so far for the holiday.

1. http-36.livejournal.com- Says:
   September 8th, 2007 at 22:13

   I’m commenting just to see if the feed on LJ updates. I thought that the way LJ and most feed scrapers work is to take one copy of each entry and treat changed entries as new posts. I know on other blogs I read if the comment is edited you get it again, so I’ve seen two or more copies of the same but edited boingboing or neilgaiman posts on my friends page, however that might be because they’re using a third party feed propagator or it’s a feature of blogger to give edited posts new ids, or something.

   so yeah, just being curious really…

   ‘Test.’

2. Aimee Says:
   September 8th, 2007 at 22:48

   I think (though i may be incorrect) that LJ will not re-post the entry unless the permalink changes. If i am incorrect i will take off the “n comments” part. I only included it because the plugin offered it, but i think it’s a bit pointless really, as it is likely to be wrong whenever the feed hasn’t updated yet.

3. Aimee Says:
   September 8th, 2007 at 23:08

   After a bit of poking around …

   If the same <guid> tag is used for two items, then LiveJournal will interpret the second as an update to the first and edit the old entry, rather than creating a new one. The same applies to the <link> tag if different links are normally provided for each entry. On the other hand, if a new <link> or <guid> is given to an item in the feed when it is edited, this will cause LiveJournal to post a new version of the entry.

   http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=151

   It doesn’t explicitly state whether a change in the content tag (without a changed link/guid) causes an entry to re-appear at the top of your friends page, but i don’t think it does. Let me know if it does, please!

4. http-36.livejournal.com- Says:
   September 9th, 2007 at 10:59

   Well it’s been 12 hours since my comment and my friends page still shows this post in the same place with ‘No comments yet’.

   I would’ve been very surprised if it had worked seamlessly, given the number of blogs I read that try to draw RSS subscriber’s attention to good comments but don’t list the number of comments on the feed.