Comments on: Protected RSS feeds, web-based news aggregators, and user convience

By: Jay Datema

Jay Datema — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:46:20 +0000

Noticed that Bloglines published an updated spec for privacy opt-out:
http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0

Niall Kennedy went to Microsoft and posted about specifically working on this problem (his post about this was subsequently removed).

By: Michael Sauers

Michael Sauers — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 14:02:21 +0000

Whoops, missed that bit. Good point. If you find a solution please let us all know.

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 16:09:11 +0000

Embedded the username and password only works if the url is a http:// url not an https:// url. Since my feeds both regular a username and password and are accessed via ssl (https://) this won’t work.

By: Michael Sauers

Michael Sauers — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:06:39 +0000

Karen;
Did you know that you can embed the username and password into the URL of the feed? The format is: http://username:password@restofURL
You’ll just want to make sure you mark the feed as private so as to not let others see your subscription and therefore the URL.
I’ve done this with several private feeds without problems. Then again, I’ve not told those that set up the feeds I’m doing it either so I don’t know if I’m violating any policies by doing this.
Michael

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 06:50:12 +0000

This has been an ongoing problem for us. One internal blog contains lots of sensitive information, so password protection is a requirement. But it also contains lots of time sensitive information, so RSS would be the ideal way to keep up with the content. But no dice. Everyone has to remember to check the blog regularly by actually visiting the site. Same thing with a distance ed class I’m teaching this summer. The site had to be sealed up tight, so no usable RSS for the students.

On another internal blog, in order to facilitate RSS subscriptions, we essentially hid the blog by not providing any hyperlinks to our site, thus preventing the search engines from finding it. Of course, we then had to stress to everyone how important it was that they not publish the link anywhere. But on the plus side, it’s a lot easier for everyone to keep up to date on this one.