Inspired by Andy Delcambre, this proxy server takes a username and password as parameters and will convert a feed URL into an HTTP basic auth request and return the results. This is useful for routing authenticated feeds into Google Reader.

You'll need to split the URL of your feed up into the following parameters:

• hostname
• url: The path to the feed, excluding the hostname.
• ssl: Set this to anything if you need ssl enabled for the feed.
• user: Your username.
• password: Your password.

Now you can just toss these into your new URL, which should look something like this...

http://myproxyserver.com/?hostname=feedhost.com&url=/feeds/privatefeeds/techpeace&user=techpeace&password=mYpAssWoRd&ssl=true

...and there's your authenticated RSS feed smiling back at you from your browser. Easy!

It's just a tiny little Sinatra app, so why not host it on Heroku for free?

git clone git://github.com/techpeace/authenticated-rss-proxy.git
cd authenticated-rss-proxy
heroku create
git push heroku master

Obviously, this isn't very secure. Your usernames and passwords will be sitting right there in the log files.

Inspired by this post on Andy Delcambre's blog.