LiveJournal has been failing in its attempts to fetch various feeds, including that for this 'blog. When I first saw that the feed to my 'blog was not being fetched, I examined the profile pages for various syndication journals on LJ; quite a few were reporting a parsing error, and next check times were passing without those next checks.

So far, there is no report at LiveJournal Status, at LJ Support, or at LiveJournal Maintenance indicating an awareness of the problem.

Up-Date: Well, the previously unretrieved entries have now been fetched, and now they appear one immediately after another on Friends pages.

Up-Date (2008:10/29 02:23 PDT): The fetching is failing again.

It is possible for LiveJournal users to effectively beFriend me (in spite of my having deleted my old LJ), by adding external identity profile oeconomist.com to their Friends lists, and by adding the syndication journal oeconomist_rss to their Friends lists.

External identity profile oeconomist.com corresponds to my OpenID, and beFriending it would allow me to read and to comment to Friends-only entries. I have been pondering whether I should allow the profile to abide, because to me it looks uncomfortably like a LiveJournal account, and I of course chose to delete my LJ account in response to LJ policies. But I've decided that the distinction is sufficient that, at least for now, I will allow the profile to remain and will use it.

Most or all of you know about the syndication journal oeconomist_rss; it pulls the non-protected entries from this 'blog and temporarily makes them available on LJ such that they will appear on Friends pages. (The only present way to get the protected entries is to log into the 'blog using an ID and password got from me. Anyone who was on my old LJ Friends list can be assured of being given one upon request.) The syndication journal itself is actually not my creäture but that of 28bytes. Comments to the syndication journal itself are not registered here, and may therefore escape my notice.

It seems that the LJ RSS feed for this 'blog is or was broken beginning with my entry Another 'Bot-'Blog (posted 26 Feb 2008 at 17:24:32). I'm not sure what the problem is-or-was, but I do note that it uses brackets as text and WordPress makes peculiar use of brackets. I have attempted a work-around by replacing the raw brackets with HTML ampersand escape sequences, though I am doubtful that this response will fix the problem, because WordPress has otherwise demonstrated an obnoxious propensity to replace escape sequences with raw characters.

Addendum (05 March): Using escape sequences for the brackets seems to have fixed the problem.

FWIW, 28bytes has creäted a(n) RSS feed of this 'blog for LiveJournal users, and another for the 'blog of the Mock Turtle. The benefit of using these feeds is that LiveJournal users can view non-protected 'blog entries from their Friends pages.

But protected entries cannot be thus read, and there is no automatic alert about there being protected entries. That's because syndication is intermediated by LiveJournal software and servers.

Also, the feeds don't deliver comments made at either 'blogs, and comments to the feeds will not appear at the 'blogs (and will likely be missed).