I haven’t had a chance to try this out, but while poking around Feedburner today, I noticed a feature I’d never seen before (well, quite a few, but one in paritcular). Feedburner now supports the use of a username and password to protect your feed.
This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if it works it really IS quite a big deal. I know of several schools that would like to syndicate their content, but only to their community. Or a class that might want to syndicate classroom content, but only to students IN the class.
Take it a step further… I know nobody wants to see blogs adopt subscription policies, but at some point people are going to begin charging for content. This allows that to occur. Imagine that, a business model for bloggers.
Definitely worth looking into, for both security and for business purposes.
This is a key component of our school intranet. For example, our Moodle site is behind authentication, and now that Moodle supports RSS and (in a manner) podcasts, we may encourage more use of subscription to access teacher-provided course content and student projects. However, for course management or blog software installed in-house, the software itself doesn’t have to provide thte authentication. Our web server can do it.
Richard
We use RSS authentication in a number of ways. Our Blogger blogs ftp to our Intranet which is password protected by the web server itself. So when anyone tries to subscribe to the feed, it asks for their web server username/password combo. Our WordPress blog feeds work the same way.
One drawback is that not all RSS readers support RSS auth, and pretty much no web-based ones do. So Bloglines for instance, no love. The reason web RSS readers don’t support it, is because they save bandwith by pulling an RSS feed once every 30 mins, and then sharing it with all subscribed users. They don’t go get each feed uniquely, so they don’t deal with individual passwords.
I think it is a great way to make administrators comfortable with blogs at your school. Tell them there is a password on it! Admins love passwords. 
[…] Password protection for your feed? (Via Teach42) On March 20th 2006, Steve Dembo posted about password protecting an RSS feed, which you might do to protect student information that is syndicated online. […]
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