Institute For The Future

RSS for password-protected blogs

For a while, I've been meaning to post some articles about how to efficiently find and read blogs. Between the sheer number of blogs, the amount of content the blogosphere turns out every day (or minute), and the signal-to-noise ratio, the task of extracting value from blogs may seem pretty daunting. However, I think most regular blog readers-- by which I mean people who try to keep track of a large number of blogs on a regular basis-- have developed some techniques for drinking from this particular fire hose.

Let's start with something simple.

Recently we've gotten a couple queries about subscribing to RSS feeds for blogs that are password protected (like this one). If you're using an RSS reader and want to get feed from a site that's password-protected, it often works to include the username and password in the URL. Normally, what you do is insert "username:password@" in the URL, between the http:// and the rest of the URL.

So, for example, if you want to subscribe to the TYF blog, you'd point your RSS reader to:

@ blogger.iftf.org/TYF/index.rdf