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:[email protected]/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.