Can any RSS reader read private Blogger blogs?

December 9, 2009 10:21 PM

How can I view private Blogger blogs in any RSS reader?

Is there any way? I think it's silly that I can't in Google Reader, since I use the same account to read those blogs as in Google Reader. Bonus points if there's a good downloadable (not online) service that can finagle it.

posted by freddymungo to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Hmm. A couple years back, I think this was impossible because Blogger didn't provide any way to authenticate for feeds. But that appears to not be the case anymore:
http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#Authenticating

I don't know of any reader that implements that, but one could. It would also be fairly simple to write a gateway that does it. In fact, here's a quick and dirty, largely untested CGI script that might work. Install this somewhere where you can run CGI scripts and then access it like:

http://where.you.put.it/bloggerlogin.pl?id=nameOfFeed&e=[e-mail]&p=yourPassword

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI qw/:standard/;
use LWP::UserAgent;

if (param()) {
    my $id = param('id');
    my $email = param('e');
    my $passwd = param('p');

    my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
    my $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST => 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin');
    $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
    $req->content("Email=$email&Passwd=$passwd&service=blogger&accountType=GOOGLE&source=askMetafilterExample-bloggerLogin-1");

    my $res = $ua->request($req);
    if ($res->is_success) {
        my ($auth) = $res->content =~ /Auth=(.*)/;
        
        my $req2 = HTTP::Request->new(GET => "http://$id.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default");
        $req2->header(Authorization => "GoogleLogin auth=$auth");

        my $res2 = $ua->request($req2);
        if ($res2->is_success) {
            print header, $res2->content();
        } else {
            print header, start_html('Error'), "got auth token, but couldn't get feed: ";
            print $res2->status_line, "\n";
        }

    } else {
        print header, start_html('Error'), "couldn't get auth token: ";
        print $res->status_line, "\n";
    }
} else {
    print header, start_html('Error'), "include id, e, p params!";
}

posted by aneel at 12:04 AM on December 10, 2009

Thunderbird can handle password protected feeds.
posted by COD at 6:02 AM on December 10, 2009

Im not familiar with how blogger authenticates, but I've had success with some feeds using the http://username:[e-mail]/rss.xml format
posted by CharlesV42 at 6:18 AM on December 10, 2009

COD, CharlesV42: Blogger doesn't do standard HTTP authentication, so normal password mechanisms don't work for these feeds.
posted by aneel at 1:47 PM on December 10, 2009