I love RSS, the ability to gather all the information and news into one application is phenomenal for me. RSS readers (the application that lets you read all this content), come in many different shapes and forms. I went with Google Reader, a web based RSS reader that would let me read my feeds from any computer with an internet connection. This is very useful for me as I am normally on more than one computer during the day. However some people prefer a desktop application, it’s a personal preference.

Google Reader has some awesome feature like beautiful and very fast interface. However it is missing a pretty important feature:  password protected feeds support. Examples of feeds that are password protected are your Gmail inbox or your Twitter feed.

The secret to get password protect feeds into Google Reader is a third party application called Feedburner. Warning – Your feed is most probably password protected for a good reason, by parsing it through Feedburner it takes the secure layer off it and is potentially viewed by anyone.

First

Find the password protected feed you want to import into Google Reader. I’ll Use my Twitter RSS feed. http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss

Second

Take the Feed URL and burn it into Feedburner, you can sign up here. Feedburner will tell you that it is not possible to burn the feed as it is password protected but it does tell you how to correct the feed and let it parse.

The feed address you entered is password protected. You can specify a username and password in the URL like http://user:password@www.website.com/index.xml.

So what you would do is stick your username and password in the specific part of the feed URL. http://user:password@www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss. You should then burn your feed into Feedburner.

Third

You should now have your Feedburner feed. Now all you have to do is add that feed to Google Reader. Now everything should work! Remember that you should not give that feed URL to anybody as it is of your confedential account.

That should do it! Any better ideas? Comment!

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