Upcoming RSS feed changes
May 15, 2008 1:29 pm StoriesonlineWhen I started implementing the site’s various RSS feeds, I took the easy road and I used a token in the URL itself for authentication. It was an acceptable solution all that time ago. However, with the proliferation of RSS aggregators and their facilities for finding RSS feeds, I found that I could easily subscribe to any member’s RSS feed that uses those facilities like Google reader.
The upcoming change will have an impact on some of you.
From next Monday on, RSS feeds on the site will require authentication. Most news readers these days support the authentication protocol required. Usually, it will only require that you enter your storiesonline’s user name and password once, and after that, your news reader should take care of the rest.
If your news reader doesn’t support this functionality, then you need to change readers.
Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause; but there is no way around this, especially with the existence of the library RSS feeds.
Update: I’ve created additional non-authenticated feeds for the New stories and the updates pages. However, for various reasons, not all stories show up in the non-authenticated feeds. So if you choose to use these feeds, you may miss stuff. But, I figure it’s better than no feeds at all. To find the various feeds, including the non-authenticated ones, check the RSS feeds page.
Second update: Firefox does not work properly with the new authenticated feeds. It asks for authentication once and if you create a live feed, the second time around you’ll get ‘Live bookmark failed to load message’ without telling you why. The only way to make firefox work with the authenticated feeds is to follow the hack outlined below in the comments.
May 16th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Does this include the vanilla “new stories” and “new serials” feeds?
And what authentication method? I’ve been using various feed readers (including Google Reader) and I’ve never seen anything like that.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:43 am
This will affect all the site’s feeds.
The authentication method is the regular HTTP one, nothing fancy. The majority of news readers support it. Online readers like Google reader don’t support authentication; so those readers won’t work at all.
I’m thinking of leaving the guest feeds for those of you that use an online reader, but be warned that if I do, it will not contain all the stories that show up in the authenticated feeds.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:09 am
What about setting up a summary or title only feed? For example, I use a feed to Yahoo to see when there are new updates or new stories in my library.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:39 am
When I originally read this message I thought surely this can’t apply to Mozilla it would be stupid to piss off that many people for so little reason.
So here it is Monday morning and I’m pissed off. Please explain to me again why think it is necessary to do this.
If it is possible to make Mozilla work a little instruction would be help full.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Firefox works, but you may need to re-subscribe to the feed. The first time you subscribe, Firefox will ask you for a user name and a password. Enter your SOL log in info and it will remember them and work from then on.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Your right that works but as soon as you close your browser and reopen it the links don’t work again.
If I have to type my user name and password each time it stops being a feature and becomes a annoyance.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Something seems to be wrong with firefox on your system. On mine, when I test it, I quit firefox and when I reopen it, it remembers the password and the user name. I only had to enter my password once for all four feeds and it remembered them in the sessions following.
So I can’t explain why yours won’t do the same.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I have 3 computers with FireFox installed and all of them do exactly the same thing.
It does remember my User Name and Password but it won’t use them after a restart.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I did a little more testing and I’m not getting the same reaction on all of my feeds. I use a feed for updates and active serials neither of which will work after a restart but I created a feed for your blog and it does work after a restart. I have also retested on all 3 computers.
I don’t see how it can be my system if at least one of your feeds works correctly.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
You’re right. Firefox doesn’t save the user name or password in the basic HTTP authentication required.
However, there is a workaround that I’ve found to work.
After you subscribe to the feeds, you need to edit the address of the live feed in order for it to work. It’s a hack and not completely secure if you share your computer with others, but it’s no worse than the token based authentication that we had before.
In Firefox 2.0, select the ‘Organize bookmarks…’ from the bookmark menu.
Select the feed’s bookmark and click Properties.
In the feed location field, you should see something like this:
http://storiesonline.net/rss/mylib.php
right after the // and before storiesonline, add your user name and password as follows:
http://username:password@storiesonline.net/rss/mylib.php
That’s http:// followed by your user name followed by a colon followed by your password followed by the ‘@’ sign followed by the feed’s url.
In firefox 3.0 there is no properties button, just select the feed and its location will show up on the bottom where you can edit it in the same manner.
Of course, don’t use this in Google reader, first it doesn’t work and second, you would be revealing your user name and password to a lot of people.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
This may be helpful for those whose RSS readers don’t support authentication.
After some quick web-searches, I read that making a simple change to the feed address can encompass authentication. From what I’ve read, this is generic and should work for any RSS feed (it works for KlipFolio, which doesn’t support authentication). I gather this is an HTTP protocol and as such is “generic.”
For example, before the “new” stories RSS feed was:
http://storiesonline.net/rss/new.php
Making the following changes to the feed address should allow authentication on ANY RSS reader:
http://myname:mypassword@storiesonline.net/rss/new.php
where, as one would expect, “myname” and “mypassword” are the login credentials.
Hope this is helpful.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
That Worked. I tried that but didn’t have the syntax correct.
Thanks
May 19th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I can’t believe I didn’t see Lazeez’s identical instructions immediately preceding when I posted. At least it seemed to be correct!
D’oh!!!
May 20th, 2008 at 6:09 am
It works flawlessly on Opera 9.27. I was a bit afraid that it was going to be annoyance, but it seems that it had worked from years ago.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
I’m Still having some problems. It seems that if you leave Firefox open too long the authentication times out.
Restarting the browser doesn’t always bring back all the feeds. I don’t have a clue why that is.
Am I right in my assumption that the reason we are being annoyed by these changes is that the old way would allow someone to access the stories without an account? If this is so I would at least understand why!
May 20th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I just figured it out if you right click on the feed you can then left click on “Reload Live Bookmark” which will then reauthenticate the feed.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:59 am
I posted a bug report for Firefox, For those of you who wish to follow the progress, here’s the link:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435140
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Great! It didn’t even occur to me that something was wrong with Firefox. I just thought it didn’t support RSS authentication.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
more likely a oversight. I can’t think of too many sites that require individualized RSS. if you notice, the login for the RSS is just like the one used on a linksys router. which tells me the login doesn’t use cookies. add to that the password manager wants to remember, but all it’s useful for is to fill in the password when you goto re-authenticate (doesn’t re-send the password when you open firefox)
June 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
It doesn’t look like anybody at Mozilla thinks this a very high priority.
I guess we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for a fix.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:40 pm
I have been using Firefox 2.0.0.14 with the Newsfox plugin without any problems. The only time I had to log in after the original connection was after I deleted the cookie while trying to work around a problem on another site.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
This seems to work with the new Firefox 3. I guess it’s a good reason not to spend a lot of effort on it in 2.0.14!
I just regenerated the RSS feed links (logging in whilst doing so).
June 26th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
FireFox 3.0 does seem to work better but I am still having trouble with one of my feeds.
I have a feed for “my active serials” which will work fine when created and stay working as long as there is something in the list. If I read all of the stories in the list and then try to access the feed again it will show empty. The problem is that if I try to access the feed sometime later I will get “Live bookmark failed to load” and I can never get the feed to work after that even if I use the reload command.
Captain
November 17th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
is storiesonline down?
November 28th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I tried to sunsctibe to the My Active Serial feed and I got a screen that says “Premier membership expired” I did not think it had, but I renewed it anyway. I went to subscribe again and get the same message. I know that my membership is OK because I I have a 0/100 in te daily cownload count. What do I need to do?
November 28th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
I have no idea what hap pend. I had the above problem when I tried to subscribe by using the RSS link in the My Active Serials page, but when I went to the Feeds page using the link on the menu bar at the top of the pages, and used the links there, I was able to subscribe OK.
I now have another problem. When I view the feeds using IE7, I can see the items in the feed, but when I use Newsgator FeedDemon, It tells me that “No items match the current filter.” I know that FeedDemon is working, because I have no problems with the feed for your blog.