diff --git a/pylinkvalidator/crawler.py b/pylinkvalidator/crawler.py
index c671bc2..ee57e6b 100644
--- a/pylinkvalidator/crawler.py
+++ b/pylinkvalidator/crawler.py
@@ -252,7 +252,7 @@ def __init__(self, worker_init):
 
         if self.worker_config.username and self.worker_config.password:
             base64string = unicode(
-                base64.encodestring(
+                base64.b64encode(
                     '{0}:{1}'.format(
                         self.worker_config.username,
                         self.worker_config.password)