Password-protected RSS

[Paul Clapham]

Is it possible to require authentication for RSS or Atom resources? And if so is that covered in your book, David?

[David M. Johnson]

Since feeds are just web resources, it is possible to use HTTP authentication methods to protect them (basic, digest, etc.). The problem is, very few feed readers can handle password protected feeds -- that's one of the reasons I did cover password protected feeds in the book.

Niall Kennedy recently wrote a nice summary of the ways some popular sites protect "private" feeds. As you can see from his summary, this is an area that needs some work:
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/09/authenticated-private-feeds.html

- Dave

[Paul Clapham]

Thank you, David. So it looks to me like customized feeds to provide private information to our customers would be a little premature just now.