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Wednesday, December 05, 2007

EZ Proxy and database RSS feeds

I haven't been keeping up with the RSS feeds supplied by the likes of EBSCO.  The other day a colleague bugged me about the fact that the RSS feeds weren't being accepted by Bloglines (or any other web-based aggregator), and upon investigation realized that instead of receiving an RSS feed, Bloglines was receiving our authentication page ('cause our EZProxy info was included in the RSS feed URL).  Checked the documentation and saw that EZProxy wasn't supposed to appear as part of the RSS feed, but couldn't figure out how to get it out, so wrote to EBSCO.  This is the response I got, and it worked like a charm!:

Most likely what is happening is that your proxy server is automatically appending your proxy information to the RSS Feed URL. I have logged into your account without going through your proxy server, and the RSS Feed URL is NOT appending the proxy server.

You want to be sure that the rss.ebscohost.com URL is never proxied, for example, see this config file:

Title ALL EBSCO
URL
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.asp?profile=adv
DJ ebscohost.com
Host search.epnet.com
DJ epnet.com
Host openurl.ebscohost.com
NeverProxy rss.ebscohost.com
Find proxy.cfm?url=http://
Replace proxy.cfm?url=http://^A
Find /login?url=http://
Replace /login?url=http://^A

As if by magic, the RSS feeds now work, and the citations contained in the feed still include our EZProxy info, so they work from off campus. Off to reconfigure the other affected databases.  (thanks for the nudge, Heather)

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference EZ Proxy and database RSS feeds:

» EBSCO and RSS Alerts from RSS4Lib
Paul Pival learned something interesting about EBSCO, EZProxy, and RSS feeds: if you don't edit your EZProxy configuration just so, RSS alerts for saved searches in EBSCO databases get rewritten to pass through your library's proxy server. And if that... [Read More]

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