Reda Lemeden

Reda Lemeden

Indie Developer & Designer

RSS Feed Issues

I’ve been running into several abstruse issues when smoke testing this website’s feeds in some RSS readers, including the newly released NetNewsWire 5. Upon further investigation, I found out that due to a glaring misuse of some Node.js APIs, all URLs have been missing a / after the https part1.

The bad news? Once the fix is deployed, most RSS readers will reset the read status of the entire feed, since the individual entries are uniquely identified by their URLs. What’s worse, readers that cache previous entries will end up with duplicate content.

I apologize for the inconvenience that this might cause and promise to be more careful to avoid syndication-related bugs like these in the future.

Footnotes

  1. For the curious, I inadvertently used the path.join(…) method instead of url.resolve(…) to construct these URLs. The former is only supposed to be used in the context of file system paths, not URLs. ↩