Subscribe to Basecamp RSS Feeds in Google Reader 4
Yesterday afternoon, we were helping our newest employee, Paige Saez, get setup with new accounts across all of our applications. She uses Google Reader and couldn’t understand why her Basecamp RSS wasn’t working in it. We explained that Google doesn’t provide any way to subscribe to authenticated feeds (yet)... so it wasn’t something she could do. (I still use NetNewsWire because of this problem…)
During the discussion, I said that it probably wouldn’t take much effort to build a proxy for an authenticated feed… and Andy said he’d give it a shot.
10 minutes later… he had an initial version of a RSS proxy application, written in Ruby.
15 minutes after that, we had it up and running on a private server for all of us at PLANET ARGON to begin using.
...and here is the proof!
Wee! Authenticated Basecamp RSS feeds in Google reader. It even works with the openid authentication.
You can grab the code from Andy’s blog post and finally make the switch off of desktop RSS readers to Google Reader, because you know you want to. ;-)
Thanks Andy!
Enjoying the content? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Be sure you’re certain that Google won’t have this feed publically indexed and available to the world. That’s half the reason we went with authentication in the first place.
Web-based aggregators very often consider it kosher to share all the feeds they service to the world at large.
DHH.
Yeah, it’s on a server and since we’re manually crafting the URL, it’d be rather difficult for Google search to ever hit it.
However, I wonder if they use the google reader URLs to feed their search indexing… hmm. Perhaps we could add another check to verify the user-agent is Google reader…
Good point though… but for the time being, the convenience of leaving NetNewsWire is a higher priority for now. :-)
Another solution is to use Yahoo Pipes as that proxy, but be sure to not “publish” it or, like DHH mentioned, it will be available to anyone.
typo: It would be wise to put a robots.txt file on the proxy serve that exposes the feeds.