LiveJournal Development

XMLRPC and fault (error) codes

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:20:04 GMT

I'm looking for documentation about erorr codes. Can you help me?

iPhoto Plugin

Sun, 06 May 2012 15:25:55 GMT

I know that there used to be an LJ plugin for iPhoto. I'm wondering if anyone would like to tackle the job of updating and/or making a new iPhoto plugin.

new Oragir v0.2 beta

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:19:05 GMT

oragir v0.2 beta

the second beta version is released. there are following features and changes:

can download the whole journal from LJ server and backup it on hard disk
allows writing new blog entries and edit existing ones
has modern WYGIWYS html editor
keeps the archive entries synced with the server
improved gui and html visualization

New Oragir 0.2 can be downloaded from here.

Posted via Oragir v0.2 (beta)

Invalid password: please help me check my data

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:41:20 GMT

Hi all,

I keep getting "errmsg:Invalid password" while trying to log in on /interface/flat, using challenge/response. I am using the right password and the MD5 hash is computed correctly (or so is seems). Maybe something is wrong with the way I use auth_challenge?

First I send "mode=getchallenge", this is what I get back:

Connection code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
auth_scheme
c0
challenge
c0:1329793200:79:60:LYkBrahns8cN8Hz5EodP:c446c32ac9c7908609c24e5facba41e9
expire_time
1329793339
server_time
1329793279
success
OK

Apparently, everything goes fine and I get a challenge string back which is: c0:1329793200:79:60:LYkBrahns8cN8Hz5EodP:c446c32ac9c7908609c24e5facba41e9

Using this string, I compute auth_response.
Now, this is the complete query with all the data that I'm sending to the server:
query: mode=login&user=ellie_1928&auth_method=challenge&auth_challenge="c0%3A1329793200%3A79%3A60%3ALYkBrahns8cN8Hz5EodP%3Ac446c32ac9c7908609c24e5facba41e9"&auth_response=5f9b791790b98f7fa89794a46a2b757a

That's what I get back:
OK
Auth response
errmsg
Invalid password
success
FAIL

As I said, I checked the MD5 hashes and the password itself.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Downloading comments

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:45:07 GMT

Hi all,

In order to process blog content for some academic research, I would need to download the comments for an article. I can already download the articles (by scraping the lightweight version of the article), but I am not quite sure how to download comments. One problem being that some comments must be expanded by clicking on a link before they are visible.

Are there any solutions available on how to download comments for public blog posts?

Downloading all public articles from a blog

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:11:41 GMT

Hi all,

I am looking for a way (for academic research) to download all articles from a blog in XML/JSON format. Is this somehow possible? I know of the RSS feed mentioned on http://www.livejournal.com/bots/ but then I only get the most recent articles from a blog, not all of them.

I would also be interested in a way to get a specific article's content in XML/JSON format, if I know the direct URL to it. I haven't found a way to do this (other than, again, the RSS feed, but the article might not be listed in the feed as it shows only the recent articles from that blog).

I am new to LiveJournal so any help is highly appreciated :) Thanks!

Timeout

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:23:32 GMT

Hi,

Does anybody know what is the minimal allowed timeout between two xmlrpc requests to the LiveJournal server? Yes, I know, there is so called "Bot policy" (http://www.livejournal.com/bots/) that says: "do not connect more than five times per second.", but since LJ documentation is usually not up to date, I need some formal clarification on this, if possible.

Thanks.

Posted via Oragir v0.2 (beta)

Net::HTTP::Spore for multiple-service clients

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:53:40 GMT

Been a while since we haven't had a discussion here that didn't revolve around "foo is broken!" or "how does bar work?" so I decided to throw this in for discussion:

Has anyone tried using the SPORE specification, Net::HTTP::Spore, or any of the other implementations (Ruby, Python, and PHP IIRC) to implement similar-but-not-identical clients for services based on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth? Any opinion of the modules themselves (if you've used them) or the spec and APIs (if you only read the docs) you'd like to share?

iOS Library to work with LJ

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:55:36 GMT

Hello, guys!

Is there any library or project for iOS (iPhone/iPad) to work with Livejournal API?

Thanks for your help!

A list of posts from friends for a given day

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:07:46 GMT

Hi!

Is it possible to somehow get a list of posts from friends for a given day? Say, I want to get a list of posts from http://youngracoon.livejournal.com/friends/ written on Dec, 24. How would I do that? Any suggestion or a link to a proper chapter in documentation?

Thanks,
Rac

Alternative multipltform client for LiveJournal web-based service

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:46:15 GMT

Oragir project implements an alternative multipltform client for LiveJournal web-based service. In contrast to other clients that allow reading and writing new entries in LiveJournal for a single user at a time, Oragir provides fast and easy way to "watch" and filter all newly added entries from all LiveJournal users at run time and store filtering results for future use. Being written in c++ with using Qt toolkit oragir performs well on any supported platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

Oragir 0.1 (beta) for Windows is released: http://sourceforge.net/projects/oragir/files/latest/download. For the rest of platforms you can build it from the sources.
I will appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

Main Window

Filter dialog

LJournaler 2.0 — reworked LJ client for iOS

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:39:02 GMT

Would like to present you an updated LiveJournal client for iOS (iPhone & iPad versions available). Great thanks for the community — it helped a lot in mining cloudy LJ API :)

Full-screen fried feed to concentrate on what's really matters:

Viewing LJ post. Swipe up to maximize viewing area, or left/right to navigate the feed:

Firends and community lists. From here you can also go to read the desired journal:

The app supports unlimited user accounts for LJ(!):

All of the features are available on the iPad as well:

Links for downloading:
iPhone-version
iPad-version
QRs:

The first twenty authors who will write a post about the new client will get a free promo code for iPhone or iPad version (please leave the links in the comments, if you have more then 100 followers then you'll get promos for both devices)!

XML-RPC get chalenge

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:02:21 GMT

Hello,

Seems something happen with getchallenge.

My code, which worked about 3 years, now return false.
Does it changed something in interface?

Below my sources

Thank you

$request = xmlrpc_encode_request("LJ.XMLRPC.getchallenge", array());
$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
'method' => "POST",
'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml",
'content' => $request
)));

$file = file_get_contents("http://www.livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc", false, $context);

Intermittent XMLRPC outage?

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:56:33 GMT

I've been seeing a lot of empty responses out of the XML-RPC interface over the last few days -- is anything going on?

syncitems: mode vs. selecttype

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:36:03 GMT

Another basic question, I imagine....

If my purpose is to fetch all the changed items for a journal, what's the point of using the syncitems mode to retrieve a list of those items? Wouldn't getevents with a selecttype of syncitems return the same thing whether or not the list had been requested first?

'journalid' and 'getevents' response

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:16:06 GMT

I'm attempting to write code that will retrieve the most recent few posts from someone's journal (using the flat interface), equivalent to what I'd see if I logged into my own account and then clicked on a link to their journal.

I got the impression from ljprotocol.pl and some comments here that it could be done by specifying a 'journalid' parameter in the request. If I use a request that correctly returns three of my own posts and add the 'journalid' to it, I get strange results. The return is not what I expect and is also not a normal error response. Instead the server is dumping a HTML page down the line with "Error 500!" / "Frank has been chewing on the wires" content.

Questions:
1) What form should the 'journalid' take? ...the username for the requested journal or something else?
2) If I am doing something wrong, why am I getting HTML instead of an error?
3) Is there a better approach to getting what I'm looking for?

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:28:58 GMT

I haven't been keeping track of LJ changes lately, but it has been brought to my attention that using getevents breaks when I'm using challenge/response authentication in my LJ client. Googling has made me none the wiser - can anyone point me to what exactly has changed regarding this stuff recently?

POST requests to livejournal.com should work again

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:21:07 GMT

One of the issues lingering with changes we made a few weeks ago was POST requests made to www.livejournal.com worked, while those to livejournal.com did not. This has now been changed so that either should work. We believe some clients attempting to authenticate with challenge/response should work again as a result of this change.

Cookies

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:48:26 GMT

The recent change that were made to the way Varnish handles cookies has caused it to reject logins if there is not a valid 'ljloggedin' cookie, whereas the client protocol only passes the 'ljsession' cookie to LiveJournal. We're in the process of changing this so that the login attempts sent with an 'ljsession' cookie will be considered valid again.

[Edit] This change is now live on the site.

Release 86 and Cookie Handling

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:12:10 GMT

Release 86 is out and those who use certain browser extensions to log into Livejournal are finding themselves unable to do so. Also, several users are finding that they are logged out randomly between redirect screens on the site. I'm guessing that these are related. A staff member commented in the release 86 post that something was changed in the way cookies are handled and that's why the login extensions are no longer working.

I'm using LJ Login to handle my logging into and out of the site, but currently it's not working. I would like to fix this. The problem is that I have no idea what needs to be fixed because release 86 did not state what was changed in the cookie handling, which I'm assuming is the culprit. Does anyone know what was changed?

For reference: LJ Login currently uses the flat protocol for logging into and out of the site. I do not know if that matters, but I thought it might.

ETA: E-mail that sheds some light

I received this VERY helpful e-mail yesterday from the LJ Juggler developer in response to query about a solution since they were able to fix their browser extension.

Andrea Nall sent me:

I am not sure if you need this info, but I feel like I should pass anything I have along to a fellow person bitten by LJ's cookie change.

LJ now requires both 'ljmastersession' and 'ljloggedin' cookies ( ljsession is *not* required )

'ljmastersession' now has a slightly different format ( v2:u#####:s###:a#####:g########//1 )
'ljloggedin' is totally different ( instead of 'u####:s####', it is 'v2:u########:s#######:t#######:g########', where 'g' is a totally different 'g' from above, and the two cannot be used interchangeably ) { the code suggests you can use the old style, but it doesn't work in practice }

And of course, 'sessiongenerate' spits out only ljmastersession, and does not give us an ljloggedin.

The only way I have figured out to get valid cookies ( while still sending the password by challenge/response ) is by first doing a protocol request to 'getchallenge' then doing a POST request to http(s)://www.livejournal.com/login.bml with the following "user=$username&chal=$chal&response=$resp" ( add "&remember_me=1" if you want one that persists ) and sucking the cookies out of the header of the response. ( you can just send "user=$un&password=$pw" to that, but bleh )

Basically, "ljmastersession" works the same way, but the old "ljloggedin" cookie, which you used to set using just the user's LJ ID and session number, now requires some sort of internal hashing/signing that isn't public. So there's no way to duplicate what their doing from outside. Which means you have to do the dance with /login.bml directly. Now, LJ Juggler is a Chrome extension, and thus written in Javascript, so it can't parse Cookie headers from the response (Javascript doesn't allow it for security reasons), so I had to find a work-around. But if the code you're working on is in any other language, you should be able to parse the Cookie header just fine. As long as you store the ljmastersession and ljloggedin cookies to send with future requests, you should be good to go!

If that doesn't make sense, or if you need more help, just let me know and I'll see what I can do!

So many kudos to Andrea for figuring it out, though.

You can e-mail the developer, Ana, at rushin.doll *at* gmail *dot* com if you have follow-up questions, which I encourage you to post here, too, since a lot of developers seem to be having issues.

I have some questions about LJ XML-RPC

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:04:19 GMT

Hi

Sorry for my English :-)

I try make LJ client for WP7. But I couldn't make some scenarios

1) In browser from PC I can open any public journals without autorization (i.e. as Anonymus). But XML-RPC method getevents requires "authentication settings"

Question: can I receive LJ events without login/password? How?

2) In browser from PC user can post comment as Facebook/Twitter/Google/OpenID etc. user.
But I can't use these accounts info for "authentication settings"
server responds "Invalid username"

Question: can I use Facebook/Twitter/Google/OpenID accounts info in XML-RPC sessions?

People asking for help in comments

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:50:04 GMT

Hi guyz:

The normal way to ask for help is by posting a new entry (and in some cases, if you think your problem is or may be related to another, linking between their entry and yours). In some cases, it means you need to join the community (and wait for your membership request to be approved), which may cause frustrating delays, so it's tempting to ask by commenting on a possibly unrelated entry. However, that's usually a bad idea, because:

- Most community members won't see your request, esp. if the entry is more than a few days old.
- You're at the mercy of the entry poster, who may delete your comment without responding to it.

When I see someone asking for help in a comment (I get notifications for all comments in the community) I try to redirect them to posting an entry, but I can't always do that, since the entry poster will sometimes delete the comment before I can get to it. (On a sidenote, I would appreciate if entry posters could wait a bit before deleting the comment, or redirect the commenter to posting an entry yourself, if you really can't wait a few hours before deleting the comment.)

Pau Amma

"couldn't retrieve anum" error when using XML-RPC

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 12:09:14 GMT

I've been unsucsessfully trying to extract my LJ content into a wordpress.com account using their import tool. The wordpress.com web form accepts my username and password and appears to successfully authenticate with LJ, but then immediately spits out an XML-RPC error. The same exact error is being reported by ljdump (most recent version, 1.5.1) when I run it on the command line on my Snow Leopard machine:

couldn't retrieve anum for entry at /home/lj/cgi-bin/ljprotocol.pl line 3952

If I understand this correctly, this appears to be an issue with LJ itself, correct? If so, what's the proper procedure for reporting this in the most helpful possible way?

I've been able to completely back up my journal using XJournal, but I don't know if the XML it produces (the .plist file) is actually of use to a wordpress.com importer, plus it does not appear to grab comments. I definitely want to preserve my comments.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Scrapbook problem

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:37:12 GMT

I'm having trouble uploading to scrapbook through the API. I posted a support request, but no response there: http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1357616

Can anyone confirm that it's broken and/or help?

Get username

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:58:09 GMT

Is there any way to get username from userid? I already have userid (got it from cookie) and want to know user name. Possible?