Fri Aug 26 19:02:57 EDT 2011
good job, penny arcade
So Penny Arcade recently redesigned their site, to add more javascript, and to make the navigation buttons smaller. That's cool, I'm all for that. Except in the process, they changed the RSS URL from "http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml" to "http://penny-arcade.com/feed". Hilariously, requests to the old URL return HTTP 200, and the front page. Apparently whoever pioneered this exciting new redesign has never heard of a 301 redirect.
Now, changing things around and breaking the RSS feed is not terribly uncommon. It happens fairly often, on small sites, usually by people who don't know what they're doing. But Penny Arcade have their own video games, their own books, a television show, and a giant downtown Seattle convention, which I can't afford to attend this year, due to being poor. They're kind of a big deal. They've got a lot of readers. How many?
Well, I don't know how many total but the one hundred and sixty nine thousand who were subscribed to their RSS feed was probably a pretty big chunk.