Dave Naffziger's Blog

I recently helped set up a password protected blog that uses Feedburner for RSS management. I didn’t find much useful information on how to make the two services work together so here is what I learned:

Password protect your blog
This isn’t actually too hard. WordPress, Typepad and Blogger all allow you to password protect your blog. It is relatively easy and their FAQs are more than sufficient. WordPress (with plugin) allows multiple username/password pairs, while Typepad only allows a single user/password account. I don’t know how blogger handles it.

Give Feedburner access to your blog
This was the most undocumented part of the process. In Feedburner, you need to modify your original feed URL with the username and password to your blog. If your feed URL was:

http://example.com/feed/rss/

you would change it in feedburner to read this way:

http://username:password@example.com/feed/rss/

Password protect your Feedburner RSS feed
Feedburner only allows you to create one username and password for its feed, so you’re not going to be able to do much user access management. Your RSS subscribers will all share the same username and password. Go to the “Publicize” tab of the feed you want to protect. Select the well-named “Password Protector” Service and enter the username and password you’d like to use.

The feed your subscribers will need to add to their RSS readers would look like this:

http://username:password@feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName