How to Subscribe to Password-Protected Feeds with Feed My Inbox

This morning we received a great question from a customer asking how to subscribe to a private or password-protected feed. That's a great question we hear quite often, so we thought it would be valuable to post it here on the blog.

Method 1

What seems to work best in our experience is to modify the URL of the feed to include your username/password. Here is what it should look like:

https://[username]:[password]@[domain]/[path]

An example with fake values filled in would look something like this:

https://admin:testing@brightwurks.com/rss.xml

Simply type that into Feed My Inbox, and it works like magic. We know this is tested and works well for web apps with protected feeds, like those from 37signals, as covered on their product blog a while back.

Method 2

If you are not so keen about having your username/password as part of the URL and would rather have a feed URL you can share with others, FreeMyFeed.com is definitely worth a shot. Simply type in your feed URL, username and password, then they will generate a NEW URL that does not have any login information in it, like so: http://freemyfeed.com/feed/SPGadlaeK1291JA91LAMadmaldkfdls= (just an example).

The only potential downfall to Free My Feed would be depending on their website to be up and working properly in order to get updates from your feed.

We hope this helps, just let us know if you have any questions.

2 Comments

Oct 1, 2009 12:25PM

1. Val

We are in the process of launching a RSS Feed on our web site that is updated twice daily. Feed My Inbox indicates that only 1 email is sent per day, regardless of feed updates. Is there a way for us to increase the number of emails to twice daily? If so, it would be perfect for our needs!

Oct 1, 2009 11:32PM

2. Nick

Hey Val!

I saw that one of my partners got back to you individually regarding your question, but I wanted to address it briefly here in public as well.

The beauty of our service (IMHO) is that any frequency settings and feed options will be in the hands of the subscriber. It's a shift from what other services do, but we think it's one that your subscribers will appreciate. If they want to be notified once per day, they can be. If they want to be notified more often, that soon will be a feature available to them.

As you want to maintain a good relationship with your subscribers so that they remain interested in your emails, it's important that they be able to subscribe on their terms. That's what our service hopes to accomplish. Thanks for the question, I hope this helps.