Private blogs

On the rare occasion, blogs I enjoy reading go dark. They turn on a private mode, where they add anyone who will be allowed to access it onto a whitelist. A common reason, is to avoid the controversy that their posts may incur. Whether this is negative people adding unwelcome comments, creepy internet stalkers from their past or to hide their opinion from parties who may otherwise take offense.

This is all well and good, but from the viewpoint of a whitelist member, it is inconvenient and awkward. If I want to read their blogs, I actually have to go to them, log in and read the posts in place. You can't add them to Google Reader and have it take care of abstracting away the log in process -- not even when the blogs are hosted by Blogger, which Google also owns. And this means, that it is easy to forget to check out these "dark" blogs. And forget commenting on them, let's say you forget the blog for a month and then coming back comment on a selection of posts made during that last month. Just like a public blog, there's no easy way of knowing if your comments were replied to, but worse still, even if there was a comment feed you couldn't subscribe to it anyway.

I'd love to know there was a way to make Google Reader work with these blogs. How hard can it be? One line of code, right? Their help system works well, and gives me this.