Fuddland
It’s come to my attention that Kinja users can’t subscribe to my RSS feeds using their usual paths, because my robots.txt file prevents the Kinjabot from accessing them. [Kudos to Kinja for making their robot standards-compliant.] To overcome this, please use the following URLs to subscribe:
Moblog[Moblog is now part of the main Weblog]Bugblog[Bugblog is now retired]
Note: If you try and follow those links in your web browser, you’ll get a 404 [File Not Found] error; they’re specifically designed to be accessed only by the Kinjabot. If you’re already subscribed to one of the feeds via some other aggregator, you don’t need to do anything — the original URLs are still correct.
The science
I prevent robots from indexing anything other than selected individual entries in order to keep a low profile in Google and other search engines. The inexplicable lack of an “allow” command to complement the “disallow” syntax of robots.txt means I couldn’t just permit the Kinjabot access to my RSS feeds and stop everyone else. Hence I turned to my .htaccess file.
The three files in the list above don’t actually exist — the user agent is simply redirected to the actual files with a few simple lines:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^kinjabot.*
RewriteRule ^blog.xml$ /blog/rss.xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^kinjabot.*
RewriteRule ^comments.xml$ /blog/comments.xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^kinjabot.*
RewriteRule ^moblog.xml$ /moblog/rss.xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^kinjabot.*
RewriteRule ^bugblog.xml$ /bugblog/rss.xml
This says that if user agent identifies itself as the Kinjabot, redirect requests for the dummy URLs to their actual counterparts.
Updated: I had tried to do this with one RewriteCond and the three RewriteRules processed together, but couldn’t seem to get that working.
Comments
Lyle | 2004 / 04 / 13 – 11:41
I really must get into this RSS stuff and so on.
It’s all part of the *cough*planned*/cough* redesign of d4d™ honest.
imogen | 2004 / 04 / 20 – 22:08
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve just recently been trying out kinja, and I can’t seem to find any good use for it. Perhaps it’s my own fault, but I already know about posts made long before kinja ever tells me about them. And some of the blogs that I love reading just never get picked up, even when there have been new posts. It’s a nice idea, but I think there must be other systems out there that are more accurate.
Thanks David, for trying to make sure at least that Fudd works for people using the conky kinja system.
David | 2004 / 04 / 21 – 00:22
Re #2: Yeah, I signed up to Kinja [mostly to verify it was getting my feeds okay] and added a few weblogs to my subscription. Its major selling point should be the fact that the weblogs or newsfeeds don’t need to provide a specific feeds — it purports to just skim the content right out of the site’s HTML if there’s no XML feed like I have.
The trouble seems to be with the monitoring of new content, which I have also found to be very slowing in updating. I’ve looked at their site and they don’t appear to provide something you can ‘ping’ like you do with blo.gs or weblogs.com, to let them know when you’ve got new content. It appears they just systematically sweep things in their database — a strategy that doesn’t scale very well as they get more and more weblogs to monitor.
This is all guesswork, I hasten to add, and they do say they’re still in beta stages, so perhaps things will improve.
Commenting Closed
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