The Death of Abnib

Next month, Abnib will die.

It’s been unmaintained for several years now, just ticking along under its own steam and miraculously not falling over. Nowadays, everybody seems to understand (or ought to understand) RSS and can operate their own aggregator, so there doesn’t really seem to be any point in carrying on running the service. So when the domain name comes up for renewal next month, I shan’t be renewing it. If somebody else wants to do so, I’ll happily tell them the settings that they need, but it’ll be them that’s paying for it, not me.

“But I still use Abnib!” I hear you cry. Well, here’s what you can do about it:

Option 1 (the simple-but-good option): switch to something better, easily

RSS aggregators nowadays are (usually) free and (generally) easy to use. If you don’t have a clue, here’s the Really Simple Guide to getting started:

  1. Download the Abnib OPML file (https://danq.me/abnib.opml) and save it to your computer. This file describes in a computer-readable format who all the Abnibbers are.
  2. Go to Google Reader and log in with your Google Account, if you haven’t already.
  3. Click Settings, then Reader Settings.
  4. Click Import/Export.
  5. Click Browse… and select the file you downloaded in step #1.
  6. Click Upload

Ta-da! You can now continue to read your favourite Abnib blogs through Google Reader. You’ve also got more features, like being able to not-subscribe to particular blogs, or (on some blogs) to subscribe to comments or other resources.

You don’t have to use Google Reader, of course: there are plenty of good RSS readers out there. And most of the good ones are capable of importing that OPML file, so you can quickly get up-and-running with all of your favourite Abnib blogs, right off the bat.

Option 2: switch to something better, manually

As above, but instead of downloading and uploading an OPML file, manually re-subscribe to each blog. This takes a lot longer, but makes it easy to choose not to subscribe to particular blogs. It also gives you the option to use a third-party service like FreeMyFeed to allow you to subscribe to LiveJournal “friends only” posts (which you were never able to do with Abnib), for example.

Option 3: continue to use Abnib (wait, what?)

Okay, so the domain name is expiring, but technically you’ll still be able to use Abnib for a while, at least, so long as you use the address http://abnib.appspot.com/. That won’t last forever, and it will be completely unmaintained, so when it breaks, it’s broken for good. It also won’t be updated with new blog addresses, so if somebody changes where their blog is hosted, you’ll never get the new one.

Goodbye, Abnib…

It’s been fun, Abnib, but you’ve served your purpose. Now it’s time for you to go the way of the Troma Night website and the RockMonkey wiki, and die a peaceful little death.

From Feed Proxy To FreeMyFeed

As those of you who use my Feed Proxy service to get your LiveJournal friends’ blogs (including friends-only posts) into Google Reader or a similar service know, the service hasn’t been working for the last few days.

I made all of the changes that LiveJournal’s bot policy required of me. I e-mailed them; no response. I e-mailed again; no response. I e-mailed to ask were they receiving my e-mails – yes, they were, but the person responsible for unblocking the bot “wasn’t in” at the moment.

I e-mailed again: yet again, no response.

I’ve been finding it harder to keep up with my LiveJournal friends because of this, and I know that a lot of you are pissed off, too. But it looks like LiveJournal aren’t going to be cooperative any time soon. So it’s time to switch services.

I’m moving my authenticated feeds over to FreeMyFeed. FreeMyFeed provides many of the same services at Feed Proxy did, although it also works for a wider variety of web applications (for example, you can also use it for Twitter, if you’re one of the dozen or so people who still uses Twitter).

If you’re already a Feed Proxy user:

Within the next few hours, each LiveJournal friend you’re subscribed to through Feed Proxy will produce a post explaining how you can convert their feed over to FreeMyFeed with about two clicks. I suggest that you mark that post as “read” and then click the link, and the rest of the work is mostly done for you. You’ll see some “read” posts all over again (boo!) and FreeMyFeed doesn’t convert LJ “moods” and “comment counts” for you automatically, but apart from that it should serve you well.

If you’re not using Feed Proxy or FreeMyFeed yet, or you’ve deleted your Feed Proxy-powered feeds from Google Reader:

Google Reader’s a great way to keep up-to-date with all your friends’ blogs – as well as with news, comics, and more – both in and out of LiveJournal. To subscribe to a LiveJournal blog in Google Reader or a similar service, friends-only posts and all, go to the FreeMyFeed website and enter into the boxes:

feed url: http://username.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace username with the LiveJournal username of the person whose LiveJournal you’re subscribing to)

user: your LiveJournal username

pass: your LiveJournal password

Thanks for all of the support you LiveJournalers have given me over the years, both for Feed Proxy and for it’s predecessor, LiveJournal-To-Google Reader. It’s been fun.
https://danq.me/tag/freemyfeed/
danq.me
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-21
27948
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7KUDG7RHS5ZNMUW6P4DJQDVHYYCIZGOK
<urn:uuid:d7ac572a-03d3-4507-a753-9eb739e4f30b>
2021-05-10T18:28:56Z
46.226.108.147
text/html
sha1:ZRKEPOKFDFCR6734D5PUTHT26Q7ZVYQS
<urn:uuid:34131494-de45-47b0-b378-ece062ef24ba>
https://danq.me/tag/freemyfeed/
response
<urn:uuid:c309767c-7b34-49c0-a0fa-df1674dc6345>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-21
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-16.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/