September 1, 2005
@ 07:49 PM

In his post The saga of RSS (dis)continuity Jon Udell writes

It's been almost three years since I first wrote about the problem of RSS feed redirection. From time to time I'm reminded that it's still a problem, and today I noticed that two of the blogs I read were affected by it. I was subscribed to John Ludwig at www.theludwigs.com/index.rdf, and today's entry says "Feed moved -- pls check out www.theludwigs.com/index.xml." In fact he's got an index.xml and an atom.xml, and the latter seems to correspond to what's actually published on the blog, but either way the issue is that we've still yet to agree on a standard way for newsreaders to follow relocated feeds.

Jon Udell is incorrect. There is a standard way to redirect feeds that is supported by a large number of RSS readers and it is called "just use HTTP". Many RSS readers including RSS Bandit support the various status codes for indicating that the location of a resource has changed temporarily or permanently as well as when the resource is no longer available.

Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel and looking for solutions to problems that have already been solved, a better use of our energy should be evangelizing how to properly use the existing technology.

Jon Udell does point out

So far as I know, that's where things stand today. If you control your server, you can of course do an HTTP-level redirect. But your blog is hosted, you probably can't, in which case you need to use the feed itself to signal the redirect.

This part just boggles my mind. If the user's blog is hosted (e.g. they are a LiveJournal, MSN Spaces or BlogSpot user) then not only can't they control the HTTP headers emitted by the server but they don't control their web feed either. So what exactly is the alternate solution that works in that case? If anything, this points to the fact that blog hosting services should give users the ability to redirect their RSS feed when they leave the service. This is a feature request for the various blog hosting services not an indication that a new technical solution is needed.