Apparently, a real request has been filed to build Hotel Lost Liberty on the current site of Supreme Court Justice Souter’s house. That is a very appropriate way to protest the eminent domain ruling, and I’m quite certain that Hotel Lost Liberty and the Just Desserts Cafe will definitely provide better revenues to the city. Via Boing Boing.
So, I just happened to notice that the Google Blog has moved. I hadn’t been paying very close attention, because I think it moved a while ago.
In doing the move of their blog, Google did the right thing by putting an HTTP response of 301 – “permanent redirect”. That’s swell. However, they appear to have done a blanket redirect of the whole blog to the front page of the new blog. That’s a nice, easy solution… the only problem is that their old feed
http://www.google.com/googleblog/atom.xml
redirects to the front page of the new blog location, not the new feed. Anyone with a feed reader pointed there, would start having some trouble.
So, the right thing to do when moving your blog (and I’m pretty sure I did this all properly when I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress) is to do a 301 redirect from your old feed to your new feed. Feed readers will pick that up automatically and you’ll notice no difference.
If you use Apache, you can just toss a line in your .htaccess file that looks something like this:
Redirect permanent /index.xml http://www.blueskyonmars.com/feed/
That line will redirect any requests for index.xml to my new feed location.
As rumored, iTunes 4.9 dropped today, with podcasts in tow. I’m not a podcast person (yet), because I just haven’t had the time to devote to listening. The integrated podcast support in iTunes is very easy. They’ve added a whole section to the music store for finding podcasts, and you can also subscribe to any podcast you know the URL for. In the Podcasts part of iTunes, you see one podcast per line. What about the multiple items that can appear in a podcast? They’ve added a new widget for selecting between the items in a podcast.
On the one hand, podcast subscriptions is an RSS thing that you’d think belongs in your feed reader. On the other hand, podcasts generally need to hook up with your music player so that they can be conveniently downloaded to your portable player (and there’s a 70% chance that’s an iPod). Since both types of programs have a hand in this, I think the podcast support in iTunes is a logical step, and it looks nicely done.
Slashdot has a posting about the growing problem of weblog spam. They’re not talking about comments or trackback spam. They’re talking about whole weblogs that are nothing but spam for the search engines.
This is a problem for the search engines that are using RSS, and it will be critical for those search engines to come up with a filtering technique that eliminates the chaff from the wheat.
Luckily, though, this is not a general problem for RSS. Unlike email, you can subscribe directly to people’s feeds and be assured that you’re only going to get the items posted by those people. If you’re reading nothing but individual sources, weblog spam is completely non-existent. That’s one step up that RSS has over email. (That said, very little email spam gets through my filters these days, so I’m sure the problem is a tractable one for the RSS search engines.)