RSS feed changing! Migrating blog in next few days.

blog (18)

tl;dr - subscribe to RSS via /feeds.xml instead of /feeds/

The current version of this blog has been running for about four years, since I wrote Notes from fifth blog rewrite. It’s been running as a Golang service that loaded posts and files from S3, which has worked out surprisingly well for most purposes. However, there are a few things that have taken a bit of effort to keep working. In particular have spent a few hours each year on the GCP Kubernetes cluster, the Docker builds, and LetsEncrypt for SSL. My actual implementation ended up being quite similar to Hugo, and over the last bit I decided to bite the bullet to migrate to Hugo.

The new implementation is pure Hugo, served over SSL on lethain.com, hosted via a Github page, and continuously deploying via Github pages. I’ve always practiced a Cool URIs don’t change strategy with this blog, and I’ve done my best to keep the URIs consistent in this migration as well. There are a few URIs that don’t make much sense anymore, for example /all-posts/ will redirect to / since all posts are now available on / directly, but generally things are still where they were.

The one exception that’s been tricky is RSS feed, which more than a decade ago I decided to host at /feeds/, in addition to supporting a number of filters like /feeds/tags/os-x to only get an RSS feed restricted to a given tag. I stopped supporting the filtered RSS feeds some time ago, but still served the general RSS feed to any URI starting with /feeds/.

My migration plan is roughly:

  1. Update the existing Golang service to serve the RSS at /feeds.xml in addition to the existing locations
  2. Post this entry explaining the RSS feed has moved. My hope is this will support motivated folks to switch to /feeds.xml
  3. Wait a day for various RSS feeds to retrieve this post, so at least they’ll have an explanation if this breaks
  4. Hack the Hugo version to copy /feeds.xml to serve at /feeds/ and /feeds/all/. Redirect other known variants of /feeds/* to /feeds.xml
  5. Live with the (hopefully minimal) consequences

I’m optimsitic this will work well enough, but I am hopeful that diligent readers will be able to read this as the last entry in my RSS feed and fix it manually. Apologies for the inconvience, and here’s to another decade or writing!

The overall look and feel is mostly an extension of the existing site, with some ideas borrowed from Julia Evans site as well on the story pages.