Hi all. I will be experimenting with returning the RSS feed to its original state, ie. not mirrored through Feedburner but rather running directly off this site.
The reason is that I’m making efforts to control the amount of data that gets out on “restricted” posts, a feature that I stopped using a while ago but have decided I would once again like to use as I “professionalize” my blog into a multi-purpose writer’s homepage-type site. As discussed here, Feedburner (and Google in general) don’t recognize feed authentication of this kind. This might explain why, for some users, protected posts have been publicly available, while, currently, with my new privacy plugin in operation, the private posts are completely inaccessible on the feedburner feed, which refuses to recognize any kind of authentication!
The take-home message I’m getting is that Feedburner isn’t interested in letting me restrict any of my posts from public cosumption. That’s too bad, because I am basically ready to insist on it — so I guess I won’t be using Feedburner anymore. (That is, if I’ve understood everything I’ve read.)
Anyway…
If you’re currently reading my site via RSS reader, and there’s no post following this in your feedreader within a day or two (I need time to experiment), you’ll want to unsubscribe from the Feedburner feed, and visit this page to get the new feed links.
This is all a nefarious plot to make my life more difficult. Admit it.
It is. I was thinking of you alone!
By the way, have you tried authenticating your feed? Its not working for me, for some reason. I can access the feed with authentication, but I cannot get any of my feedreaders to display the protected posts. (And they’re displaying wrong on the raw feed.)
Perhaps I shall have to try another plugin…
(edit) Actually, I think I’ve found a solution that may do what I need without complicating your life on whit! Can you imagine! :)
I am confused. I do my feed by hand… just bang out the XHTML right there in my text editor. I wouldn’t know how to protect my posts even if I wanted to. And I would not know where to begin with this thing you call “authentication,” either. (You’re not pulling my leg, are you?)
So… hopefully that solution you found works. :)
Dood.
HTML authentication is easy. If you’re accessing a feed, you do like this:
http://feed.url.here/path/you insert your username and password for the site as follows:
[http://]username:password[@]feed.url.here/path/Without all the square brackets…
Most modern feedreaders let you set that.
If Google and Feedburner had endorsed this technology, it’d probably be standard by now, but they haven’t. Anyway, yeah, the workaround I have doesn’t require it, since it suppresses the content right at the level of the feed, while presenting a title and whatever text I choose to leave public. (Which is great because through coding stupidity, Google and a few other services have made it possible to share authenticated feeds with unauthenticated users. Argh!) I’ll be testing it soon, so you can let me know whether it works for you.
Oh, I see. When you said “authenticating *your* feed,” you didn’t mean *my* feed, you meant *your* feed, right? Because my feed should not require authentication. This is why I was confused.
Uh, yeah. I can see how this would be confusing. It’s your access to the feed that gets (or doesn’t get) authenticated, I think.