I feel as if finally I have found a decent newsreader; capable of getting regular RSS, ATOM based feeds, and even retrieving friends only postings from LiveJournal and DeadJournal, allows you to authenticate for protected feeds, has systray notification, and is five to seven times faster than any other solution out there. NewzCrawler is the most effective reader of its kind, and is the first for-pay reader that has actually been worth its price tag. At the nice cost of only $25, you get a very clean, simple, and effective 3 paned interface with compatibility for everything that you need. Normally, I am a fan of open source solutions that are free to develop and tweak. I am very happy to say there is little I would change about this product.
The catch is, you must use LiveJournal's new "digest" mode authentication for RSS. You can access it by attaching ?auth=digest to the rss URL. For example: http://www.livejournal.com/user/data/rss becomes http://www.livejournal.com/user/data/rss?auth=digest
You then simply give NewzCrawler the information for username and password, and it logs you right in! Gone are the problems of being unable to aggregate your friends' postings. This was the only thing that stopped me from using a newsreader all the time. Now if only Tabulas and Xanga saw the value in feeds for their people who blog. I'm still learning the Atom format, as I am weary to offer a feed I don't entirely understand.
The move to B2 is almost complete, I just need to build an effective archive script and reroute all old MT references to the new format. Drop the MT archives and database tables, and I am completely switched. It's a very nice feeling.
In response to "Newsreader for LiveJournal Friends Postings":