Please, Own Your RSS Links
https://heydingus.net/blog/2024/1/please-own-your-rss-links
I have a follow up report for this post.
I actually transferred a domain to Hover.com to try this out since my host didn’t offer that kind of granularity.
I created a forward from another domain ‘xyz.com/rss’ to my ‘notes.bryan.lv/rss’ at Micro.blog. But when I type in xyz.com/rss into my browser it redirects correctly but then my rss feed reader subscribes to the forwarded address where it’s truly at, defeating the purpose. It’s only when I type in xyz.com/rss directly into my feed reader when this works appropriately.
I’m not sure how good that forward really is at keeping your followers if the link is clicked vs put into a reader manually.
@bryan Yes, I can see the issue there. I guess in my mind, your readers would be pasting 'xyz.com/rss' into their feed reader. Once the redirect has been resolved by the browser, I wouldn't expect it to revert back to the homespun URL to pass it to the feed reader.
That's certainly a barrier unless you have access to the meta <link> tags where your content is served and can define your custom RSS URL there. Possible, I think, for Micro.blog by editing your template files. But not so much for something like YouTube or Buttondown.
But you're right, clicking the link is not an ace-in-the-whole. Thanks for the report.
@HeyDingus In your post you reference redirecting to example.com/feed.rss and also to example.com/rss. Both should work (I think?) but do you recommend one over the other? Thanks!
@collectededitions Personally, I think I prefer /blog.rss because it makes it super clear about what content will be coming through the feed and what format it’s in. Second place would be /feed.rss and third would be /rss for me. /rss kinda looks like it would just a be a page on your site about rss.
But, take all that with a grain of salt because I’ve set up all those options to redirect on my site. 😅
@jarrod your post was enlightening! I've just set up redirects with subdomains like mastodon.website.tld 👍