rss | feed
December 4th, 2005Today I created a rss feed for the news section on Brookins Consulting.
Then I started thinking that it might be simpler just to have a domain like rss.brookinsconsulting.com which provided a site’s rss content rather than a http://brookinsconsulting.com/rss, so I set one up, it is very slick 
Advertising studies show that more people can remember a simple easy to understand third level dns name than a url with a /path/to/unique/location.
Like most mod_rewrite (rules) voodoo it can take a while to re-learn the required syntax + debugging. The rule used is little confusing but it works! Note: I the directory tag without brackets (it’s required but this blog software cuts out the tags for some reason?
# directory /var/httpd/www/
# Using (Dynamic Mirror) http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/misc/rewriteguide.html
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^$ http://brookinsconsulting.com/rss [P]
# RewriteRule ^rss$ http://brookinsconsulting.com/rss [P]
# RewriteRule ^rss\.html$ http://brookinsconsulting.com/rss [P]
# /directory
Most people’s rss feeds URLs and URIs are horrible, ugly, convoluted, and sometimes even have ?foo=variable in them url, i prefer to follow w3c’s recommendations on URL/URI addresses.
Out of this work on the company rss news feed. I also found and created a patch for an eZ publish rss export feed formating bug #6420 which I am working on getting into eZ publish trunk.