Author: Alex Kirk

You currently can’t subscribe to an authenticated feed (for example in Basecamp) in Google Reader.

If you want to do it nonetheless you can use this script of mine which will talk to the server that needs authentication, passing through all the headers (so that also cookies and “not modified” requests will come through): download authenticated-feed-passthru.php


<?php
// change this url
$url = "https://username:password@proj.basecamphq.com/projects/123/feed/recent_items_rss";

$ch = curl_init($url);

if (isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']) && strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']) == 'post') {
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $_POST);
}

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);

$headers = array();
foreach ($_SERVER as $name => $value) {
    if (substr($name, 0, 5) != 'HTTP_') continue;
    if ($name == "HTTP_HOST") continue;
    $headers[] = str_replace(' ', '-', ucwords(strtolower(str_replace('_', ' ', substr($name, 5))))) . ": " . $value;
}
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

list($header, $contents) = preg_split('/([\r\n][\r\n])\\1/', curl_exec($ch), 2);
curl_close($ch);

foreach (preg_split('/[\r\n]+/', $header) as $header) {
    header($header);
}

echo $contents;


If you don’t mind giving away your credentials you can also use Free My Feed.

I have added a feature to the HN Collapsible Threads bookmarklet that enables you to close a whole thread from any point within the thread:

This is useful when you are reading a thread and decided that you are having enough of it and want to move on to the next thread. Before you had to scroll all the way up to the top post and collapse that one.

Drag this to your bookmarks bar: collapsible threads

Install Greasemonkey script