Access to Protected Content for FeedBurner Email Subscribers

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

Hey Guys,

I have just implemented a FeedBurner email subscription service at my blog so my visitors can enjoy receiving posts in their mailbox each day. I seem to have everything working properly, except I am encountering issues displaying content once a subscriber receives an email, due to the hotlink protection code I have in my .htaccess file.

I have researched this topic and found the following code, which works great for the Feedburner feed itself, but I’m still encountering problems with displaying the content in email messages, as the email clients are being blocked and the images are broken, with only the text displaying.

Here’s the code I am currently working with:

Hotlink Protection with Feedburner Access

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://bradbare.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://bradbare.com/.$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.bradbare.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.bradbare.com/.$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.feedburner.com/.$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feeds.feedburner.com/example-feed$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feeds.feedburner.com/example-feed-comments$ [NC]
RewriteRule ..(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|mp4|flv)$ - [F,NC,L]

I am hoping that someone will have a solution to this problem, because I would prefer to avoid removing the hotlink protection from my .htaccess file, to prevent bandwidth theft. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Brad.

#2

Re: Access to Protected Content for FeedBurner Email Subscribers

The problem is most people who subscribe through FeedBurner don’t actually read the subscription there. Instead they have FeedBurner email them daily in a digest format… I see your letting FeedBurner through via .htaccess but not the multitude of different email clients which would be nearly impossible.

The only way I can think of getting around this would be if you can alter your RSS feed? If you can you could always append ?feedburner to the end of all your image files and then use .htaccess allow them through?

RewriteCond %{query_string} !^feedburner$ [NC]

Other than that not sure what you can do except for unblocking images all together.

Sincerely,
Kevin.

#3

Re: Access to Protected Content for FeedBurner Email Subscribers

Thanks for your reply Kevin, I appreciate your suggestion. I will look at appending code to the end of the images and trying to alter the RSS feed. I will experiment with this, because I want my visitors to view my blog updates using their email client, while still preventing hotlinking from elsewhere. Thanks again Kevin. :slight_smile:

Brad.