Bloglines RSS and ATOM Extension for Restricted Distribution

If you write a personal blog, chances are you want to restrict access to selected readers or family contacts only. But in the current scenario, your posts cannot stay private as search engines index and track all your posts via your RSS or atom feed.

In an effort to protect the privacy of your personal thoughts, Bloglines has proposed and implemented an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed.

“Setting the access restriction to ‘deny’ will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In Bloglines, we’ll use this to prevent the display of the feed information or posts in search results or any other public venue. If other readers and aggregators use the information in the same way, and publishers of feeds, including services that let users create feeds, implement this standard, we could make significant progress toward making feeds truly safe for non-public information.”

You can read the technical details about implementing it. <_access:restriction> element will be used to indicate the re-distribution restrictions for a feed, while the ‘relationship’ attribute is will indicate whether a feed will ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ access.

To deny access, you will need to use.
<_access:restriction relationship="deny" >