Read the Plus Edition Newsletter in an RSS Feed

I have been monitoring the comments posted in the online survey about the Plus Edition e-mail messages. (See http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/05/changes-required-in-the-plus-edition-email-newsletter.html.) One thing that caught my eye is that several Plus Edition subscribers wrote "I would read it if the Plus Edition newsletter were available via RSS" or similar words. Actually, that has been available for nearly five years now. Apparently, not everyone knows that.

The Plus Edition RSS newsfeed is available at: http://eogn.com/wp/?feed=rss2.

However, in order for your RSS newsreader to fetch that newsfeed, it must be capable of entering your user name and password when retrieving the newsfeed. Most RSS newsreaders are not capable of doing that. A few RSS newsreaders do have that capability.

I use NetNewsWire RSS newsreader for Macintosh and it easily handles user names and passwords. I have been reading the Plus Edition newsletter for years by using the NetNewsWire RSS newsreader. I noticed that two Plus Edition subscribers stated that they also use NetNewsWire and are already reading the Plus Edition's RSS newsfeed. However, the majority of respondents didn't seem to know that it is already available.

If you are a Plus Edition reader and if you would like to read the Plus Edition newsletter in your favorite RSS newsreader, please consult the documentation for your newsreader to see if it supports user names and passwords.

Again, most RSS newsreaders do not do that although a few of them will do so. I do not have a list of which ones do handle user names and passwords versus the ones that do not. I can report, however, that NetNewsWire for Macintosh does handle user names and passwords properly. You only have to enter your user name and password one time, the software stores that information on your hard drive and uses it each time it retrieves data from http://eogn.com/wp/?feed=rss2.

NetNewsWire is an excellent RSS newsreader for Macintosh that is available free of charge at: http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/netnewswire/default.aspx.

Comments

[Rick Koelz]

I've been reading the newsletter using an RSS reader for over a year.

My reader doesn't support user name and password access but I can still read all the non-Plus articles and the intro blurb on the plus articles. If I'm interested in reading the rest of a Plus article I just click on the article head in my reader and that takes me to the web site allowing me to finish the article.

[Bob B]

Didn't know about the Plus Edition feed.

Just added it to my feeds in IE8 which seems to support passwords (right click on the feed in favorites, select properties, and then password). Hope it works.

[Bob Paulson]

I enjoy very much using Dick's standard newsletter with NewsBreak (v. 2.1) on my Windows Mobile Pocket PC. However, when I try to add the Plus edition, it complains "The channel data was not valid. Make sure that you have entered the URL of an RSS, XML, or Atom newsfeed and not a standard website url: The feed could not be parsed."

I have defined the URL as http://eogn.com/wp/?feed=rss2 and entered my user name and password, which NewsBreak allows me to do under channel properties. The properties for the standard newsletter show that its URL is http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/atom.xml and that works fine. Any ideas?

Thanks, Bob

[Dick Eastman]

You DID enter your Plus Edition user name and password into the RSS newsreader, right? When that program (NewsBreak?) goes to retrieve the articles, it must first enter your user name and password. Otherwise, it will never be able to retrieve the articles.

- Dick Eastman

[Bob Paulson]

Hi Dick,

yes, I had entered my Plus Edition user name and password into the "properties" for the feed before I had asked NewsBreak to refresh it. It must be some problem with the initial handshaking between NewsBreak and the site, or some other WM/Pocket PC problem. For example, yesterday, when I was away and tried to enter these comments from that (touchscreen) device using Opera Browser 8.65 for Windows Mobile, the Post and Preview buttons here were disabled, even after I had entered my name and email address, and the words "Name" and "Email address" stayed in the fields as normal text even when I clicked on them, until I selected and deleted those words and entered my info.

The wonders of technology. Thanks anyway, Bob

[Ben S]

Dick, thanks for the explicit RSS pointer. I didn't know about the RSS option for Plus because it is not listed on your page which details the RSS feeds available from the site ( http://www.eogn.com/rss-newsfeeds.html ).

I use NewsGator on my Windows laptop, which supports credentialed RSS feeds (i.e. those that require a username and a password). However, whenever I try to add your Plus RSS feed ( http://eogn.com/wp/?feed=rss2 ) with my EOGN username and password, NewsGator churns and reports that "Error: Subscription could not be added. Please check the URL and try again."

It looks like the Plus RSS actually redirects to another URL ( http://www.eogn.com/amember/plugins/protect/new_rewrite/login.php?v=-1,2&url=/wp/%3ffeed=rss2 ) - but entering in this URL as the source gives me the same error.

It also looks like most of your other feeds are published either as static XML or RDF files, but the Plus RSS feed is published as a dynamic link via PHP (which makes sense, because of the username/password check present in the process). Maybe this is what NewsGator is choking on, but as I have used this tool with other protected feeds, I don't think this is the issue.

You are in the business of providing first-rate content, not for providing technical support ;-). I'll keep plugging away on my end, and maybe another reader will see this thread and have a solution.

-- Ben

[Dick Eastman]

---> It looks like the Plus RSS actually redirects to another URL

Yes, that is deliberate and also is how most protected content on the World Wide Web operates. The RSS news feed is at http://eogn.com/wp/?feed=rss2 but before your newsreader can fetch it, the newsreader is redirected to a log-in page. The URL of that log-in page is irrelevant but your RSS newsreader MUST enter your Plus Edition user name and password at that point (which most RSS newsreaders cannot do). Once the user name and password is entered, the newsreader is automatically redirected back to http://eogn.com/wp/?feed=rss2 and is able to fetch the news feed.

As I wrote in the article: "However, in order for your RSS newsreader to fetch that newsfeed, it must be capable of entering your user name and password when retrieving the newsfeed. Most RSS newsreaders are not capable of doing that. A few RSS newsreaders do have that capability."

- Dick Eastman