Ben Gutierrez wrote a nifty little Perl script called ljfriendfeed.pl. This works as a CGI and queries your friends list off LJ, then combines all the RSS feeds into a single combined feed.

I've modified it to work as a local program, without the overhead of a web server. Then I put authentication into it. So now it can include locked entries. It still works as a CGI if you want it to (see the top), but if you put your friends' locked entries onto the interweb you're not a very good friend! So keep that in mind, please.

I used to be a Perl programmer but haven't been in a decade as of this writing. So there's nothing to be proud of, here, but it works. A much much better way to do it, but even more liferea-specific, would be to just periodically (from cron?) poll the friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) data and use liferea-add-feed to add new friends as they appeared. Then they'd all show up in the feed list individually. But that might require additions to the DBus service and I have not gotten around to it. If you do, please let me know!

Here's ljfriendfeed-local.pl.

To use it with liferea, first fill in the user-customizable bits in the script. Then create a new subscription, source type of "command", source of the full path to the script; make the script executable. To accomodate one of the non-XML-friendly quirks of LiveJournal, check "Use conversion filter" and enter "iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8" as the filter. I also set unlimited cache, though it does make liferea really slow sometimes. You may not want to do that.

Please do not hammer on LiveJournal's servers. Set a sensible refresh interval.