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.
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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