Marking Subscriptions as ‘Private’ in Bloglines

Monday, 14 February 2005

If you’re using Bloglines to subscribe to either of this site’s members-only RSS feeds, there’s one more step you need to take in addition to the recent changes to support HTTP authentication.

(If you don’t use Bloglines, or, if you do but only to subscribe to Daring Fireball’s regular (free) RSS feed, feel free to ignore this post.)

Even with your authentication credentials embedded in the URL, Bloglines still does not, by default, treat the subscription as private — these feeds will still appear in your publicly-available list of subscriptions. One would think that a web-based aggregator would default to treating feeds which require a username and password as private — but one would be wrong.

If You’re Adding New Subscriptions in Bloglines

After entering the feed URL and clicking Subscribe, be sure to choose “Private” in the Access pop-up menu on the next screen. The default value, “Public”, will make your membership credential viewable to the public.

If You’re Updating Existing Subscriptions From the Old URL Format to the New One

1. Click on the “My Feeds” tab.

2. Click “Edit”.

3. Click the checkboxes next to the feeds you want to mark as private.

4. Choose “Mark Private” from the “Choose Action…” pop-up menu.

5. Click “Submit”.