Oh, BTW, hi. I'm new here. Someone slap me if I'm posting in the wrong place. :)
I've other things to add/fix/change about LJ too, whenever I get around to it. But before I go writing a custom news page for LJ, I should check if someone has already created this: A script to display, in the style of a journal, the most recent X entries in both a journal and that journal's friends. Probably with GET vars for which entry to start on, and how many entries to display.