Alex e-mailed me earlier and told me that the RSS feed on my family blog was broken. Actually, I’d password protected the site, and forgotten to update the details in Feedburner (which translates Blogger’s Atom output to RSS for me). I couldn’t find any fields in the feed service settings to supply username and password credentials until an unusually helpful error message suggested that I should enter the URL as http://username:password@domainname/document.extension.

I knew that particular syntax worked for FTP, but not for HTTP too! Of course, if I was really that bothered about security I should secure the site using HTTPS, but in this case, the username and password is only a deterrent and there’s not really anything there that needs SSL security.