[development] authenticated RSS feed

[Chris Johnson]

I'm involved with bunch of Drupal sites which generate a lot of new 
collaborative content nearly every day.  While they are using tracker.module to 
present a page of recent nodes, the amount of data is still overwhelming to get 
through.  Sounds like a perfect use for a good RSS reader, right?

The problem is, none of the content is viewable without being an authenticated 
user.  RSS readers, like Thunderbird (the greatest unknown RSS reader :-), 
don't know how to log into Drupal to download the feeds.

Is this something that can be solved by modifying Drupal's feeds to conform to 
a standard authentication method for RSS?  I can certainly do the work, but am 
looking for collective knowledge and advice to get me up the learning curve 
faster and avoid building something that only works for me and my audience. 
I'd like to solve it generically, if possible.

..chrisxj