How to get my iPhone to read a password protected RSS feed?

July 26, 2010 2:41 PM

Anyone know of a way to read password protected RSS feeds on the iPhone or iPad?

Using Typepad, I have a password-protected blog where I post briefings for my boss, who is a public official. My boss wants to be able to use the blog's RSS feed on his iPhone and iPad - however, it seems that mobile Safari cannot read a feed that requires authentication.

I have tried using Feedburner to serve as a sort of translator of my private RSS feed from Typepad. I enter in the name and password there, and it works by generating a non-password protected feed. If I enable Feedburner's password protection service, then I am back to square one.

If there is no app that already does this, someone should be doing it and making money!

posted by metamush to technology (3 answers total)

How about NetNewsWire? (Warning: link might launch iTunes) The mobile version has mixed reviews (compared to the Mac desktop version, which has been best-of-breed for years) but it should do what you want.
posted by bcwinters at 2:51 PM on July 26, 2010

I bet you could do a similar "translation" trick through Yahoo Pipes. If you don't publish the Pipe, it *probably* won't leak out and get indexed. You could even set it up so that the password is passed through the URL, so someone would need to know the exact URL (with ?password=whatever string) in order to access it.

Depends how secure you need this feed to be.
posted by meta_eli at 8:28 PM on July 26, 2010

.Mac reader on the iphone cannot access a url that is http://username:password@webaddress of the feed.
posted by metamush at 6:38 AM on July 27, 2010