in response to my

request

regarding rss readers and basic authentication,
olivier “webvoice”
travers

was nice enough to alert me to the fact that
radio userland

supports the feature by url-encoding the username and password
according to the following scheme:
http://login:password@my.site.com/filename.filext. this then
reminded me that all rss readers employing a self-respecting
user-agent can fetch an rss feed protected with http basic
authentication. indeed,
netnewswire

will also fetch protected feeds using the same url-encoded
mechanism [ in hindsight this is head slappingly obvious and i should probably be flogged for not thinking of it straight away ]. i haven’t tried
amphy

, but i’m sure it’ll work as well. i’m none too keen on exposing
passwords in urls and neither is
jim roepcke

as evidenced by his
netnewswire
feature request

, but i could live with it if i could find fetch feeds over ssl,
which i know that
netnewswire

doesn’t support currently.

when i get a spare minute i’ll have to
crank up
amphetadesk

again, since i strongly suspect it basic authentication over
ssl.

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