Quick SocialText RSS from Bloglines tip
I've been playing with SocialText's publicaly hosted solution lately. More on that later, but, first, a quick tip.
As with many on-the-curve companies, SocialText's products extensively export web standards - RSS, SOAP, REST (in beta). I use Bloglines for reading lots of things, so, subscribing to changes to a shared wiki seemed obvious. Except that SocialText workspaces are, by default, authenticated and password protected. However, Bloglines has no explanation of how to subscribe to authenticated feeds... worse, when I found an explanation of how to do it, it didn't actually work with my SocialText username and password - because my SocialText username is an e-mail address, containing its own, conflicting, @ sign.
The fix is to rewrite the e-mail address in HTTP encoded mode. If you wanted to subscribe to a SocialText RSS feed like http://www.socialtext.net/feed/workspace/my-workspace?category=Recent%20Changes, with e-mail address myemail@somewhere.com and password password, then follow these steps:
- Rewrite your e-mail address, replacing @ with %40. ie:
myemail%40somewhere.com - Generate the new feed URL:
http://{rewrittenemail}:{password}@{rest of original URL}. In this example that would behttp://myemail%40somewhere.com:password@www.socialtext.net/feed/workspace/my-workspace?category=Recent%20Changes - Use the newly generated URL to subscribe with Bloglines.
- ... profit?
Now, you're subscribed to that RSS feed. Maybe someone will read this an generate the requisite bookmarklet to automate the rewrite/subscribe to Bloglines process. Anyone?
(P.S. Anyone know why Technorati refuses to update my blog, especially noticing the Technorati Tags?)
Technorati Tags: socialtext, wiki
Comments
Hey, BP, you'll find this buried in our documentation wiki :-)
URL Authentication (NOT RECOMMENDED)
Some RSS aggregators allow you to specify newsfeed authentication by adding your username and password to the URL (web address). We strongly recommend not to do this. It is not secure, because saving or sending the URL includes your authentication details in cleartext along with the link.
How it works, if you want to use this method at your own risk:
Place your username and password after the "http://" and before the hostname in the URL. Separate the two with a colon, ":", and separate them from the hostname with an at-symbol, "@". The at-symbol in your username must be replaced with the 3-character sequence "%40".
So for username "user@example.com" and password "password", you'd use a URL of the form http://user%40example.com:password@www.socialtext.com/workspaceid/index.cgi?action=rss20&category=My%20Weblog
Note that this authentication method is no longer supported by Web-based aggregators based on Microsoft Internet Explorer IE6 with the latest security patches.
Posted by: Ken | September 22, 2006 09:22 AM
Ah, so it is. I guess I didn't run the right Google query before. D'oh.
Posted by: bp | September 22, 2006 11:05 AM