OPML Sharing and Polling Security


Prompted by Scoble, I uploaded my OPML to Dave Winer's OPML sharing site.

You should too!

I was just about to comment that it would be nice—along the lines I was suggesting in Aggregation Versus Hosting—if you could just provide a URI for your OPML and have the site pull it in on a regular basis.

Well it turns out you can. Thank you Dave!

Now if Bloglines would take the same URI (via polling plus the ability to force a reload) I'd be even happier.

Making a resource available for polling rather than uploading it to a variety of sites raises some additional security issues. What if I wanted to make my resource available to aggregator.example.com but no one else? One possibility would be to submit the URI along with a username and password that aggregator.example.com could use with Basic Auth to retrieve the URI. Alternatively, and more securely, aggregator.example.com could publish a public key and I could configure my site to encrypt the resource using that public key whenever aggregator.example.com requested it. I wonder if either would fly.