Publishing a Private Feed through PrayerMate

PrayerMate has long given churches and Christian organisations the option to publish prayer content that users of the app could then subscribe to. But until recently, the only choice available to those organisations was to make their feed publicly accessible through the “feed gallery”, meaning that anybody in the world could access your content and giving you no control over who could see the things that you published. This has typically worked well for Christian charities who already publicly publish a prayer calendar, but in general churches have been a bit more cautious about broadcasting the specific details of people and activities within their church to an unknown global audience.

Introducing PrayerMate Private Feeds

Since the end of December, PrayerMate now supports private feeds. Each prayer diary published through the PrayerMate Publishing Platform is given a unique (and hard-to-guess) URL and a corresponding QR code. Even if they’re not included in the public feed gallery, you can share that URL or QR code with whoever you want to, and they just open it up in their browser, or scan the QR code using the new button at the bottom of the feed gallery page in the app, and it will grant that person access to your feed.

As an example, here’s how you would subscribe to the Open Doors USA feed: http://prayermate.s3.amazonaws.com/1/f177274cde2d7063e38e03d24bed2f3769c0.html

What it is not: a “secure” feed

I refer to these as “private” feeds rather than “secure” feeds for good reason – that URL is all that’s required to access your prayer content, and ultimately as much as you can request that people don’t pass it on, you still don’t really know whose hands it has fallen in to. There’s no support at present for password-protected feeds or feeds that require specific approval from an administrator before people can access the content. For this reason, you are still advised not to publish content of an extremely sensitive nature, or which might put a missionary’s life or ministry at risk (or anonymise/generalise it where required).

Prayer feed short URLs

Although I originally developed this functionality to create hard-to-access prayer feeds, I quickly realised that it also made existing public feeds earier to access. Upon request, I can now create you a nice “praynow4” short URL to let people access your feed quickly and easily – a great way to publicise your feed on social media or on your website.

As an example, you can find the Operation World “Country of the Day” feed at http://praynow4.org/OW.

If you want me to create a short URL for your organisation, just drop me an email using the button inside the app.