Passwords for Private Feeds

I had dinner tonight with some friends, one of whom was frustrated that he wasn't able to view one of my other blogs in his newsreader (he uses rss2email) because the site requires a username and password. This is a pretty common problem these days.

One lesser-known feature of the URL spec is the ability to specifiy a username and password in the URL itself. To use it, you prepend the user and password to the machine name, as so: http://user:password@www.example.com/blah/blah/blah. Most full-bodied http libraries support that URL option, so I checked rss2email (which uses Python's urllib) and it worked like a charm. So if passwords are bugging you too, give this a shot -- your reader will probably handle it.

Comments

[Aren]

So let me get this straight. Some wannabe tech-head installs rss2email, gets it set up as a cron job on the server he runs, and then doesn't even bother to try the most obvious solution to the password-protected sites?

Definitely a no-hire on that guy. (Hope he doesn't read your blog!)

[Ficus]

I had this problem too :(

Screw you, Aren

[Aren]

Sarcasm aside this time, I was the guy Michael was mentioning in his original post. Glad to know I'm not alone in being a techie and not remembering to try the user:pass@ syntax.