The atom feed has been fixed, to everyone's horror

Quick overview

Old feed link: https://www.timtimestim.com/rss-timtimestim.xml
New feed link: https://www.timtimestim.com/feed.xml

I didn't like the old link because:

• It wasn't actually an RSS feed, it was an Atom feed
• It had poor standards compliance that I didn't want to change because backwards compatibility
• The name of the link was really ugly

I've set up a 301 redirect from the old link to the new link, so you probably don't need to update your feed reader's url. But you are probobably going to get a lot of spam from old posts and stories, since I fixed a lot of the non-standards complaint stuff.

This change is technically backwards compatible, but it's a little annoying for your feed reader, which is why I'm making this post to tell you everything is fine and that it won't happen again.

If that's all you needed to know, you can leave this post. If you want an extended rant, continue on.

Extended discussion

Ah, I was so young when I first tried to set up the "RSS" feeds on this site. Back then I thought I would want to have more than one feed for every section, like a feed for the fiction stories (then called the "short stories" section) and another for the blog, and a site-wide one for everything.

Eventually I realized that I only wanted to use the site-wide feed, which was called rss-timtimestim.xml. I had other ones like rss-blog.xml and rss-shorts.xml, which meant that the "site wide" one had the site's name as the thing. A single feed is easier to manage, and less confusing for other people.

There are numerous problems that cropped up with this.

First and foremost, the feed wasn't actually an RSS feed, it was an (and still is) Atom feed. I chose Atom feeds because I looked at both of the standards and thought that Atom was less terrible (at least as non-terrible as you can reasonably get using something as horrible as XML).

Why did I name it "rss-..." instead of "atom-..."? I'm glad you asked! It's because I'm a moron. Next question.

Seriously, though, I was really inexperienced in web stuff when I started this site, so I was under the impression that "RSS" could be used to talk about both Atom feeds and RSS feeds. Like using "Band-Aid" to talk about adhesive bandages, even though Band-Aid is a brand name. I've realized that this is confusing, but I was stuck with the rss-timtimestim.xml name.

I didn't think to update the name of the feed when I was fixing my other mistakes with the url structure, which seems to hint towards me having a smooth brain. Despite my cognitive disabilities, I've at least tried to fix as many of the mistakes as I could. It just so happens that the feed change is more vocal to the two people that use it.

That inexperience showed in some of the earlier entries in the old feed. Take a look at the first entry, to see what I'm talking about:

<entry>
<title>(blog) Incipient Insipid Instigation</title>
<link href="https://www.timtimestim.com/blog/incipient-insipid-instigation/"/>
<id>https://www.timtimestim.com/blog/incipient-insipid-instigation</id>
<updated>2020-02-01T15:00:00Z</updated>
<content>(~344 words) Tim tries to justify the existence of this blog. It doesn't work.</content>
</entry>

This is a pretty standard entry for the most part. The problem areas are in the <id> tag and the <link> tag.

The old linked were still being used from before the great website refactoring of 2020, since I wanted to maintain backwards compatibility. The old link still work, but I felt icky about linking to them anyways.

But the big issue is the <id> tag. What that tag is supposed to look like is:

<id>urn:uuid:6ada145a-9cc9-4e36-8b23-ccf2395f2163</id>

As you can see, I couldn't have fucked up more badly. Well, I could have, but that's only because I wasn't being intentionally malicious with my feed. The point of the <id> tag is to provide a unique identifier for the entry; this means using a uuid. But since termites have burrowed into my frontal lobe I wasn't able to pick up on this, even though everything from Wikipedia to the official standard documents tell you to use a uuid.

The straw that broke the camel's back was this blog post from nullprogram.com that talks about how horrible RSS is as a standard and how you're supposed to use a uuid with your Atom feeds. This angered the termites, who rioted until I sat down for an hour and fixed the issue.

The old feed was a Frankenstein's monster mishmash of properly done uuid's and old-style links and new-style links and badly done <id> tags and a great deal of pain. Not to mention that the name of the file was misleading, long, and stupid.

Since I've updated the urls and the id's your feed is probably going to freak out. I consider that to be a "breaking change" so to speak, but a minor one that will only happen once. You don't have to update your link if you don't want to, since the old link is redirected to the new one.

I'm sorry for spamming and ruining your feed, but if my hunch is correct the only people who use this feed are me, the termites, and maybe one other person. This website isn't exactly the most popular web page on the internet, so I felt comfortable doing this minor inconvenience. The inner obsession I have with backwards compatibility forced me to warn you about it anyways.

-Tim