Feed the Artists

So, now that I’ve actually got Tapestry up and running, I’m going to talk about a concern I have about the feeds themselves.

While Dilbert is massively syndicated, collected in numerous treasuries, and used in a variety of books such as The Joy of Work, earning Scott Adams a decent living, PvP (for example) does not enjoy the same trappings. By providing a feed for lazy people like myself, I’m taking eyeballs away from the site, meaning the site sponsors won’t get as many views, potentially leading to loss of earnings for Scott Kurtz. (Perhaps I’m overegging the success of the feeds, but I’m sure you get the idea.)

This disturbs me. I’d rather not be responsible for someone else’s loss of earnings.

What I’d really like to do, is have an ad-free feed from the PvP site, and Scott charges $2 or $3 per month for the feed (he keeps all the money). Making the feed password protected would allow for this, but of course, this requires the RSS aggregators to support HTTP authentication. Since most aggregators tend to have their viewer components based on IE or Mozilla, then I suppose this should be mostly in place already. Is there a list which details aggregators and whether they support HTTP authentication (or HTTPS)?