index.rdf 404s?
Posted June 7th, 2004 @ 12:11pm by Erik J. Barzeski
What do you see when you visit http://nslog.com/index.rdf? A week or so ago I moved solely to index.rss and comment.rss feeds. My 404 page triggers a search, and my MovableType activity log has, since I replaced index.rdf with a very generic "Please use a different feed" stub you should see when you visit index.rdf, "index.rdf" has shown up in the search list hundreds of times per day.
How can this be failing? index.rdf exists in the same place it's always existed. Why aren't people just seeing the contents of index.rdf and saying "oh, I should switch to index.rss." Why are they getting 404s for index.rdf? It has me thoroughly stumped (though I haven't had the time to do any research beyond just noting my activity log in MT).
P.S. Yes, I know I could use a 301, but very few feed viewers seem to actually support that code. I'll use it when we test PulpFiction's support for it.
Donate Life
Posted 07 Jun 2004 at 12:48pm #
Why don't you use a server redirect for it? When I converted macmegasite to a static feed, I added a redirect from backend.php to index.rss so anyone who had the old feed subscribed would automatically get forwarded to the new one.
Posted 07 Jun 2004 at 3:56pm #
The new rdf works fine; it's what made me update my feed URL. The hits you see are probably partially from blog spiders and partially from people who have a RSS viewer running without using it. (Just my guess.)
One person with its viewer on and set to check every 15 minutes could rack up 100 hits within a day.
Posted 07 Jun 2004 at 4:57pm #
Can't you just symlink the files, e.g. ln -s /path/to/index.xml index.rdf? I've done this to a bunch of old files on my site and it works great.
Rob