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Anti-pattern: Beware the Screw up Coté's Feeds Redirect, or, Shifty HTTP Servers in Las Vegas

I’ve been curious over the past few days why Vienna hasn’t been pulling in new items from my feeds. So, I just went to dig around for more info, and was horrified to find out that all the URLs for my feeds — you know, 100’s of them — to the “register for WiFi” page for the hotel. That is, I’m going to have to go track down all the URLs for the feeds and fix them.

In essence, I’m screwed.

And there’s the larger lesson about winning by doing the wrong thing. Without digging into the actual guts to see what’s happening, my theory is this: the hotel WiFi network does a permant redirect, the type of HTTP redirct that has the semantics of “this URL has permentaly changes, so update your URLs.” So, like a good HTTP client, Vienna went and updated all my URLS.

In the happy path — if Steve or James changed their feed URL, Vienna would switch to it without hassling me. But, unfortunitly, you can’t trust that people will use permanant HTTP redirects correctly.

Thus, allow me to say again: I’m screwed.

Trusting HTTP servers in Las Vegas is clearly a bad idea.

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Categories: Programming.