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)
Comments
5 Responses to “EZ Proxy and database RSS feeds”
EBSCO and RSS Alerts
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…
Paul, you always have the solutions for problems long before I even realize I need help. Thanks for this tip, which I just discovered courtesy of David Rothman (http://tinyurl.com/3ha74c). You rule, dude!
Glad to help, Stephen 🙂
Okay, I cannot get this to work for me for some reason.
We’re running EZProxy 5.1 and we have added the
NeverProxy rss.ebscohost.com line, but when I click on an individual article via an RSS feed from off campus and attempt to access an article, it still takes me to the EBSCO login screen (rather than campus login screen); situation is still the same when I add our ezproxy info to the beginning of the link. What could I be doing wrong or what could we be overlooking? Any ideas?
THANKS!!
Not sure, but surely you’ve got ezproxy enabled within the EBSCOHost Admin pages, right? (under the linking tab, then SetUp/Maintain Proxies) Have you copied the stanza in the post above exactly? maybe comment out what you have and put this one in. Other than that I’m not sure :-/