Subscribe to Basecamp RSS Feeds in Google Reader
7 comments Latest by rick Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:25:31 GMT
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.
According to Google Webmaster Information site, Google does not index feeds from Feedfetcher, which is the technology Google uses to retrieve feeds for Google Reader. But if Googlebot finds the feed (which I don’t know how it would), then it would be exposed. It would be wise to put a robots.txt file on the proxy server to expose the feeds.
http://scholar.google.com/feedfetcher.html#secretserver
But, I still don’t agree that exposing your feed to the wild is a good idea for the sake of being able to use Google Reader. But you already know that :)
typo: It would be wise to put a robots.txt file on the proxy serve that exposes the feeds.
Did google reader every add this feature?
no, but bloglines has had it for years.