Russell Beattie

So I find it very amusing that a few weeks after I write about the death of RSS feeds, Twitter goes and disables Basic Authentication on their site, and doesn't have any immediate work-around for a user's authenticated timeline feed. And apparently, no one really cares, either. I'm talking about the feed that's *still* linked to from the orange feed icon at the bottom of your home page when you're logged in. I use that feed to keep track of my personal subscriptions in my news reader - but she's dead Cap'n. One would think that Twitter will eventually either re-enable Basic Auth for that specific feed, or at least provide some sort of token link workaround, but who knows when that'll happen. Especially since the number of people complaining about it (on Twitter at least) is almost non-existent.

Well, the nice thing is that I have my own little oAuth-enabled Twitter service already up and running called Roomatic, so I quickly added a hack this morning so I could get at my feed again. Just click here and it'll forward you to Twitter to ask for authentication, you click yes, and it'll re-direct you back to the same url with some params which passes through the raw xml feed of your subscribers tweets (I'm not looking, I promise). Just use that URL in your feed readers, and poof, instant Twitter feeds again. I'm pretty sure the security token doesn't expire, so it should be good to use for the foreseeable future. (Once Twitter re-enables that feed again, I'll probably just shut it down as there's no reason to deal with all that bot traffic.)

[Update Jan 2012: Twitter never re-enabled the feeds so I shut down the service. Sorry.]

BTW, the feed may display oddly in Google Chrome, of course, because it doesn't bother even supporting RSS or Atom without a separate extension. But then again, it's a dead format, so why bother, right?

;-)

-Russ