Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
The biggest mistake I ever made was to install WordPress at the top level. The second, was to use “smart” URLs.
My site was restricted due to bandwidth overlimit this morning, something that shouldn’t have happened. When I checked my stats, one site, proxyit.com, was hammering my bandwidth. Checking the recent visitors list, this domain was grabbing my feed every minute, except it was grabbing the Burningbird feed, which was then redirected to the new combined feed, at http://burningbird.net/feeds/atom.xml.
This feed, created by the aggregator, Venus, hadn’t changed, but with the redirect, it was coming up fresh and sparkly new. Now, that doesn’t excuse the fact that this site was accessing it every minute, but I’m not sure that my twisted convoluted redirects to feeds wasn’t at least partially responsible. To make matters worse, I used an inline SVG object yesterday, which shouldn’t tax bandwidth limits overmuch…unless your feed is being hammered.
(Not to mention that using SVG inline absolutely killed my entry at Planet RDF…)
Of course, when I redirected my Burningbird main feed, /feed/ to atom.xml, this redirected all other variations of /feed, including /feed/atom, /feed/rdf, and so on. Not just for Burningbird, but all sub-domains, too. So I had to add more redirects, which attempted to bypass WordPress’s programmatic management of URLs. I had to so many redirects in my sites to get feeds to serve correctly, I wasn’t sure who was getting what. So I’ve removed all of them.
One of my site changes is to remove WordPress at the top level. I’m replacing it with a page generated by Venus that combines all feeds from WordPress installations in sub-domains. Each sub-domain gets its own WordPress installation. Some will get the full installation, and others will get my new semi-forked version that I’ve named Curmudgeon WordPress. Curmudgeon WordPress is a WordPress installation that has had all the reader interactive bits, such as ping back, registration, XMLRPC, and comments, and their associated includes and admin functions removed.
When I get all this finished, no more RDF feeds, no more RSS feeds. You get one feed for each WordPress installation, an Atom feed. And you get one overall feed generated by Venus, name and location TBD, generated once per day.
In the meantime, feeds may be a problem. My bandwidth may be exceeded. Yada yada, you know the rest.
