SimpleFeed has made a secure RSS option available for businesses that wish to publish RSS feeds while requiring a login to view their content.
Mark Carlson, CEO of Palo Alto-based SimpleFeed, said ahead of the Demo 2006 conference that his company is working with a few financial institutions on implementing SimpleFeed Secure.
Those secure feeds deliver their content over SSL. Without a validated login, those feeds only provide a summary of that content. Secure information only goes across an authenticated feed, so users do not have to worry about someone trying to view content like financial data in a feed where that authentication has not been provided.
SimpleFeed Secure works with any RSS reader or browser that supports username/password for RSS; Carlson cited the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7, currently in Beta 2 Preview, as one example.
“Somehow, content has to get into an RSS feed,” Carlson said, by way of introducing SimpleFeed’s Web Import feature. This enhancement really does simplify the process. Cut and paste a URL into SimpleFeed, and the content in that URL becomes part of the site’s RSS feed.
The imported item retains the look and feel of the original website. SimpleFeed noted how the new feature supports the import of podcasts and blogs along with other web-hosted content.
For some types of sites, like dynamically-generated ones, SimpleFeed does some work up front to ensure the site’s content can be properly imported. Once that is complete, the Web Import process takes on the cut-and-paste ease of use.
A new option for smaller sites and experimenters, in the form of a self-service offering, can be established through a straightforward web interface. The solution costs $99 per month per feed. “It will be a templated, nice-looking feed, with the customer’s logo on it,” Carlson said.
The self-service option will include some reporting features along with that service. Each self-service feed publishes as a unique URL in the simplefeed.net domain, and like other SimpleFeed services supports an unlimited number of subscribers.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
