Now on FeedBurner
I just moved the blog feed over to FeedBurner. It’s a permanent redirect, so your reader should handle the move for you, but it doesn’t update in Vienna. Please make the change yourself (and if you’re using some other reader, make sure it updated)—otherwise, you’re just bouncing off my server every half hour for no reason. Thanks.
April 25th, 2007 at 03:49:56
Vienna used to handle permanent redirect, but I disabled it. The problem was that some providers of temporary internet services, such as hotels, were improperly sending out HTTP 301. Thus, Vienna users were reporting that when they traveled with their laptops, their entire subscription lists were getting wrecked, permanently redirected to the hotel URLs.
We probably should implement a UI to handle permanent redirect, but until that happens, disabling it was necessary, I believe.
April 26th, 2007 at 18:35:57
What about treating 301s like 307s? (That might be what you do currently, I’m not a Vienna user).
April 26th, 2007 at 18:37:13
Or, alternatively, handle the 301, but keep the previous value around so if the new URL breaks, the previous one is tried.
April 29th, 2007 at 07:32:31
We do temporarily redirect to the new URL. The new URL could break for any number of reasons, so we wouldn’t want to check the old one whenever that happens.
We probably should just ask the user to confirm the permanent change. However, there are difficult policy questions here in designing the UI. In the case of hotel redirects, for example, it’s going to happen for all of your feeds, so we’d have to have a checkmark or something to apply the decision to all of them, otherwise you have hundreds of dialog boxes. But how long should your ‘Don’t ask again’ decision last? If it only applies to the single refresh, then you’ll get the dialog every time you refresh from the hotel, which isn’t ideal. What if you’re on a two week vacation? On the other hand, you don’t want it to last permanently, because then you’re ignoring legitimate 301’s in the future.
I’m certainly open to ideas, but unless someone comes up with a really good one, I’m inclined to stick with the status quo, temporarily redirecting and leaving any permanent change for the user to do manually.