Google Reader – Where is your support for authenticated feeds?

The main organization I work with uses Confluence as its internal wiki platform (and possibly for blogs too, we’ll see how that progresses). I have never been in love with it as a platform but on the principle that with social software, who is using it is often more important than what they are using, I’m trying to get behind it.

But it is frustrating the heck out of me for a number of reasons. We’ve CAS‘ified Confluence, which is great for single sign-on, but it means that any ‘protected’ space now requires authentication to get the RSS feed. And honestly, a wiki without RSS feeds is a non-starter for me.

Enter Google Reader. I made the switch about a year ago and now it is fairly entrenched in my workflow. Except…Google Reader doesn’t do authenticated feeds. So now I’m faced with either switching RSS readers again (ugh) or getting daily wiki updates via email (are you serious? At least Greader could support the email-to-RSS feature like Bloglines used to, and no, the Gmail to RSS hack wouldn’t work in this case).

Frustrating. Added to that, Confluence as a blogging platform leaves a bit to be desired, and to deal it’s inelegant posting workflow (10 clicks compared to my 1 or 2 now) I am trying out some XML-RPC based clients (because it does, at least, support that through a plugin). Hence, really, the reason for this post, to see if the ScribeFire (formally Performancing) plugin for Firefox will do the trick and provide a simply, free way of posting between both my WP blog and Confluence. Wish me luck. So far the experience hasn’t been stellar, with a memory leak and other bugs plaguing what should be a simple process. – SWL

7 thoughts on “Google Reader – Where is your support for authenticated feeds?”

  1. Try NewsGator. It’s free and supports authenticated feeds via all available clients: browser based, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Go! for mobile devices. If you want to reach inside the firewall, you’re going to need to purchase their enterprise product.

  2. Colin, thanks for that, I will have to give it a try. Paul, before Colin’s comment I was about to say “No, I don’t” – I know at least that Bloglines doesn’t. Be interested to find out whether any of the web desktops (Netvibes, etc) do, but I kind of doubt it.

  3. I’m in a very similar boat and looking for a solution. Most of the WordPress plugins related to limiting access do not handle making the RSS feeds authenticated.

    Perhaps the best route is to somehow hook into WP’s API from the wiki?

    Did you come up with any solution on this?

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