We had a few quirks with the rollout of the new site the other day that gave me a chance to re-learn a couple of old lessons.

The first error didn’t even start on this site. I’d mentioned in our intro post that we’d briefly considered .haus as a TLD before rejecting it as too close to .house. That change came really late in the game, and I forgot to update the link from my old blog before I posted. Complicating this mistake was the configuration of our website, which still allowed high90.haus to be a fully-acceptable domain name, rather than a redirect to high90.pub.

I realized and corrected the link error about 30 seconds after my post went live, but most RSS readers had picked up the article already.

Everything changes, but RSS is forever. Lesson relearned.

As a result, folks were dutifully sent along to the old domain well after I’d made the fix and, due to our misconfiguration, the site worked just fine. After my friend Gabe Weatherhead helpfully pointed out that our first article was already out of date the moment it was published, I was able to get the redirect in place, limiting the fallout a bit.

Yesterday, another old friend noted that our RSS feed wasn’t showing up well in Feedly. I wondered aloud on the @_high90 Twitter account if it might be an issue with their service, since the feed worked fine in Feedbin.

Within moments, Feedly support chimed in with the real answer:

They were right. Our site used nested <rss> tags in its feed due to some template misconfiguration on my part. After checking my other sites I realized that the problems I’d experienced in the past were also related to parse errors with incorrect or invalid RSS feeds.

The lesson I relearned here is that while the internet seems big, search tools and social networks can make it seem very small. It helps to assume that everyone relevant to a conversation is listening, and be sure to check and double check your code and assumptions before you post.

Mea culpa.

Posted on March 12, 2015 at 12:00AM by Erik Hess