Frequently Asked Question #219

Your Friends page displays the most recent entries from your entire Friends list or certain users of your choice. Downloadable clients, RSS feeds, and notifications can also notify you when your Friends post new entries.

Friends Page

• Display Limits: If your Friends have posted more entries than appear on your Friends page, then you can follow links on the page to view their older entries. However, your Friends page will only display up to 1000 of the entries posted in the last two weeks. If you have a Paid Account, you may also view your Friends page from any day by appending the date to the Friends page URL in this format: http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/friends/?date=YYYY-MM-DD, where YYYY-MM-DD is the date in the year-month-day format, eg. 2009-01-06 for January 6, 2009. Note that month and day must have 2 digits, even for January-September or the first 9 days of the month.


• Order: Entries on your Friends page are listed by the server time they are received to prevent entries from being hidden behind other entries in different time zones. However, the displayed entry date is based on the user's computer or chosen by the user. The combination of these two dates can cause entries to appear to be out of order based on the displayed time, despite being posted in order by the server time.


• Customization & Friends Colors: You can customize the appearance of your Friends page in the same way that you can customize your journal page. This allows you to change things such as the overall layout of the page, its colors, and the number of entries that appear on it. Many friends page styles also use foreground and background colors for your Friends when displaying your Friends' entries.

Filtering Your Friends Page

You can use two methods to filter your Friends page.

• Custom Friends Groups:


• Friends Filter Page: The Friends Filter page will display entries from any combination of groups.


• Add the Group Name: You can also go directly to a filtered version of your Friends page by appending the group's name to the end of your Friends page URL. For example, if you had a friends group called group1, you could visit http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/friends/group1 to see only entries from members of group1.


• Default View and Mobile View: If you create a custom friends group named Default View, your standard Friends page will display entries from your "Default View" group. The Mobile View custom friends group filters the users on your Mobile Friends Page. (If you do not have a "Mobile View" configured, then this page will show entries from members of your Default View, if any, or all of your friends.)


• Unfiltered Friends Page: You can make your Friends page display unfiltered, ignoring your Default View, by appending ?filter=0 to the URL: http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/friends/?filter=0.


• Journal Type:


• Add ?show=P to display personal journals


• Add ?show=C to display communities


• Add ?show=Y to display syndicated feeds


• Combining the letters will show multiple journal types on your Friends page. For example, adding ?show=PC displays personal journals and communities, but not syndicated feeds.

Other Notification Methods

Downloadable clients, RSS Feeds, and notifications can also notify you when your Friends post new entries.

• Downloadable Clients: Some downloadable clients have the ability to notify you when there are updates to your friends page, often by flashing the system tray icon or generating an alert.


• RSS Feeds: While LiveJournal does not offer an RSS feed of your Friends page, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your Friends' journals, using an RSS reader. LiveJournal cannot recommend any specific RSS reader to use or provide assistance with using such a program.


• Notifications: You can subscribe to your Friends' journals in order to get notifications when your Friends update their journals.