Don't Change Your RSS URL

I love RSS. My RSS feed reader is the page I visit most on web, I think. So it's very frustrating when folks update their site, but don't redirect their RSS feed - please remember to do it, people.

My RSS feed reader of choice is Miniflux, which has a great progressive web app (PWA) so I donโ€™t need to use a 3rd party app to access my feeds (although I can if I want). Itโ€™s so simple and content focussed, I love it.

Anyway, one of the features of Miniflux that I find useful, it that it tells you when a feed breaks. Itโ€™s not in your face, you just get a little (1) next to the feed link if thereโ€™s a broken feed, like this:

broken-feed

The problem is, this seems to happen way more than Iโ€™d like and the vast majority of the time, itโ€™s because the URL to the RSS feed has changed.

I have 188 feeds on Miniflux, and of those, thereโ€™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.

Itโ€™s not a massive job, but itโ€™s annoying. The most frustrating part though, is that it can be prevented easily.

How to stop your feed URL breaking

We all know that cool URLs donโ€™t change. So setup a redirect on something like /feed that goes to your RSS feed and add /feed to your pageโ€™s meta like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest posts" href="https://example.com/feed"/>

Then no matter which platform you end up using, all you have to do is remember to update that redirect and the URL will never change for your readers.

Personally, I do this within my Apache .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 "/feed" "/index.xml"

Just replace /index.xml with whatever the URL for your feed is. Most hosting providers and/or CMSโ€™s offer some kind of redirection functionality, so you should be able to find the way to do it on your site rather easily. But if youโ€™re using Apache, like most people, the line above in your .htaccess file should work just fine.

If youโ€™re using Nginx, this post by Robb should help you with redirects.

Then, as if by magic, your RSS feed URL will never change and youโ€™ll never lose readers who subscribe by RSS, just because youโ€™ve decided to make a change. Win/win.

Iโ€™ve just been made aware of Feed Canary a really useful tool that monitors your RSS feed. Worth checking out if you want to monitor your feed(s).

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