Russell Beattie

The return to Windows means the return to Bloglines for me. This is good, I like the convenience of an online aggregator and like their service a lot... when it works. When it ignores feeds, updates irregularly, or shows me the same posts over and over and over again I want to kill. Yes, I'm overly sensitive, but I live by my aggregator. If it works well, my day moves faster.

Okay, so here's what happened: The core problem is that the new version of WordPress hard-codes URLs for your feeds in the wp-includes/classes.php file (took me a few weeks to figure this one out) and ignores any rewrite-rules in your .htaccess. So my blog used to use index.rss as its main feed url, and had a mod_rewrite rule to point at the proper URL (which used to be index.php?feed=rss2). But WP2 doesn't like that, and started returning the index.php home page instead of the feed when I moved over. It turns out you have to hard-code the name you want into the $feeds array in WP_Rewrite class in order for it to work. So at first I simply changed the official feed URL of my blog to /feed (like WP wants) and added a 301 Permanent Redirect, and most aggregators moved to the new one.

That should've worked, but Bloglines ignored it - so then I started messing around with .htaccess and my mod_rewrite rules to get index.rss to work. I *thought* I had it working as index.rss would return the xml when I grabbed it in FireFox, but then something really was bonked. It took some help from Tim Bray himself to point out that the HTTP header on the file was returning a 404, despite the fact that the content being returned was fine. Urgh. I'll have to file that one in the old WP bug database.

Okay, so THEN I finally worked out how to really fix the feed a couple days ago by hard-coding the name of the URL into WP, and waited for Bloglines to update. And waited. And waited. And that's where we are now. Bloglines *really* should follow the 301, that'd be the easiest solution. Then there'd be 3,000+ readers on Bloglines who wouldn't be pinging me about my feed not updating and I wouldn't be writing this. But then, even if a feed is screwed up for a while, once it's fixed it should be updated. Another feed that's not working is del.icio.us/popular - god knows why.

Even if Bloglines starts updating, it's still not great as I now have two feed URLs, which is bad. I think I like the /feed standard though, so I'd like to move to it... If only Bloglines would follow 301s properly, I would. Actually, I think I'm going to undo my "fix" of the index.rss and go back to the 301 and wait for Bloglines to work like it should. Now I'm really not sure - as flipping back and forth isn't a great idea either. Urgh.

-Russ