Daring Fireball membership denied in Google Reader, Bloglines

October 29, 2006 / Filed under: RSS, Web Sites

Last week, John Gruber opened up his members-only RSS feeds to the public, for one full week, with the intention of inticing more readers into paying for a full year membership to Daring Fireball.

I have to admit, I enjoyed my "feed reading" a little bit more, this past week. The included links, "Jackass of the week" awards, Apple thoughts, etc. - all these things have peaked my interest. Not to mention the posts are very consistent - at least 7-10 per day.

Without further ado, I went ahead and purchased a one year membership to Daring Fireball, for $19.

Excited at my now unlimited access to the RSS feed, I immediately tried to subscribe to the feed in Google Reader.

Woops.

No feed available for "http://daringfireball.net/feeds/combo"

Hmm. Google Reader doesn't seem to like authenticated feeds. This could be a problem, since Google Reader is my main reader.

OK. Not a big deal. I'm a "tech person," so I understand when things sometimes don't work. There is always other options.

Onto Bloglines. (I'd be willing to use Bloglines solely for Daring Fireball feeds. I could easily keep Bloglines open in another tab, in Firefox, and it wouldn't be totally ideal, but better than nothing.)

Woops again.

No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.

Hmm. Double hmm.

Onto Google.

  • Niall Kennedy gives an overview of authenticated and private feeds. He also ascertains that the Daring Fireball RSS feeds are unusable in Bloglines and Google Reader. (Some feedback suggests inserting the username and password values directly in the feed URL, but that's an obvious security issue, and even when I tried that, it still didn't work.)
  • A Google Groups topic gets a response from a Google Reader engineer, mentioning that Reader does not, in fact, support authenticated feeds.
  • John Gruber, himself, chimes in on Rafe Colburn's weblog, explaining why he converted to "Basic Authentication" for Daring Fireball RSS feeds:

The only downside to using HTTP Authentication is that some web-based readers still don't support it, including Google Reader. Most of my members haven't had any problems with it, though.

Well, apparently I'm an "odd man out," since I use Reader. I find it hard to believe that, with the popularity of Daring Fireball, I'd be one of the few in the minority that use Google Reader or Bloglines (which are also very popular readers). Enough so that there isn't even a "mention" of the incompatabilities with these readers, when you go through the process of purchasing a membership. If I would have been aware of the incompatabilities, I obviously would not have purchased a membership, at this time.

I'm still waiting for an email reply from John, but in the mean-time, I can only think of alternative ways to utilize the RSS feed.

I am guessing he may offer a refund for the $19, but I'm not expecting it. As far as I'm concerned, as much as I've used Markdown, I owe him at least $19. So he can keep it.

Overall, it's not really his fault - it's Bloglines and Google Reader's fault - who haven't yet figured out a way to support authenticated feeds. Until they do, I guess I can't enjoy Daring Fireball.

UPDATE (8/8/2007): Recent changes at Daring Fireball have now made the full-content feed available to the public as non-authenticated, meaning it will work in Google Reader.

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