RSS URLs and Cool URIs That Do Not Break
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Kev Quirk ☛ Don't Change Your RSS URL
I have 188 feeds on Miniflux, and of those, there's at least a couple that break every week. So I then have to go into the feed settings, visit the site, find the new feed URL, then update it in Miniflux.
It's not a massive job, but it's annoying. The most frustrating part though, is that it can be prevented easily.
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Chris Coyier ☛ Exposed RSS
So yeah — if you’re going to bother having a feed, or get one for free, make sure you’ve got that <link> tag in place or anybody like me will assume you don’t even have one.
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[Old] World Wide Web Consortium ☛ Cool URIs don't change
When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.
When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated - emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.
Enough people complain all the time about dangling links that I hope the damage is obvious. I hope it also obvious that the reputation damage is to the maintainer of the server whose document vanished.