The Travelin' Librarian

There are certain circumstances in which you may want to put some username/password authentication on an RSS feed. Unfortunately, this will lock out those using Bloglines as it does not support authentication. There is a way around this. All you need to do is embed the username and password in the URL of the feed. So, if your URL is:

http://www.yadda.com/index.xml

and you need to login with:

username: steve
password: feedme123

The subscribe to the following URL:

http://steve:feedme123@www.yadda.com/index.xml

Bloglines will accept this revised URL and give you access to the feed. One word of warning however, this is a security hole. To minimize the problem, make sure you mark the feed as “private” in Bloglines so others may not read the URL and thereore the username/password information.