Cross-site reading? How does that work?

[jducoeur]

Huh. Just noticed in today's DreamWidth update that they are now allowing "cross-site reading" -- the implication being that you can integrate your LJ friendlist into your DreamWidth one. It's a feature that I *desperately* wanted in CommYou, but concluded was difficult-to-impossible at the time. So now I'm curious how DW is making it work. My suspicion is that there's been an API enhancement while I wasn't looking, and that's very intriguing: if the API now provides a good way to get at your flist, it might make a good Android LJ-reading client more plausible...

Comments

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I believe dreamwidth is all open source with a publicly readable repository, but if you can't find the code, a friend of mine (and former provost of Mitgaard, so you may remember her) is a dreamwidth developer; I could put you in touch.

[jducoeur]

No, that's the point: DW is the same codebase as LJ, or at least it was originally. So now I'm curious whether they're still roughly the same base, or if DW has forked and gotten into new functionality that I'm really interested in.

(I'd actually much rather they were still working in the same codebase, since that would imply that LJ has this functionality as well now. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that DW has long since forked...)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yes, they've forked. LJ's New Russian Overlords, apparently having realized they had not, after all, acquired a golden goose, laid off the entire engineering staff (without notice or severance) last June.

Mark, the DW technical founder, had already started DW by then, and significant enhancements to the code were always part of his plan. (Mark was a major volunteer contributor to LJ in college (and IIRC in high school too). LJ hired him straight out of college, while they were still in Portland and independent. He moved to SF with the Six Apart acquisition and at some point during the actively stupid management phase went to work for Google. LJ had initially been a labor of love for him, and DW is at least partly an attempt to get back to the ad-free, communitarian roots of the pre-Six Apart, pre-Russian, LJ.)

At any rate, LJ now occasionally picks up DW enhancements, but I don't think there's a lot of code going the other direction.

[jducoeur]

Okay, good to know and not entirely surprising. I'll need to investigate this more deeply, and see if the relevant bits exist in the LJ codebase. (learnedax's comment makes it sound like this may be based on an existing but undocumented LJ API; if DW is able to import from LJ, that would imply that that is so.)

Not that I actually have any time for a new programming project right now, of course. But a part of me has been looking for an excuse to mess around with 'droid programming, and this would actually be useful...