I’ve been thinking about private RSS feeds quite a bit recently. I’d like to get more and more information (server stats, account balance warnings, etc) that I just don’t want to share with other people. Also, I’d be nice to provide things like that to ‘customers’. Say I want to subscribe to my amazon “where’s my stuff” ‘feed’. (They don’t build one yet, but they should!) Then all my tracking info and all my internal package moves inside amazon would all just pop up in the feed reader. But hey, not everyone should be able to subscribe to my amazon “where’s my stuff” feed. (I would like people to be able to subscribe to my ‘wishlist feed’, that would be cool.) Anyway, all of that stuff should be able to run over SSL and with some kind of authentication. The problem is mostly in the feed readers – which ones work with Auth or SSL or Both?
The web is great. [Private RSS Feeds: Support for security in aggregators](http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/july/privaterss) [Livejournal](http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149) has another method, in the URL with a digest auth Things that use [magpie RSS](http://laughingmeme.org/archives/001973.html) (like my aggregator, [Feed on Feeds](http://feedonfeeds.com/) And so forth. Cool.
You know, I bet with Amazon’s web services (in particular) I could do all that stuff I was discussing. In fact I bet it’s been done before. Yes. Yes it has.