I Broke My RSS Feed Because I Stupidly Decided to Hack it

Sometimes, I am too much of a hacker for my own good. Note the distinction: I am not a good hacker, apparently.

This morning, I had this wacky idea of making the default RSS link for WordPress (my blog) point to my FeedBurner link. But I didn’t want to change the code in WordPress because I didn’t want to have to do it again later when WordPress got an update. So I opted to use the .htaccess file. For those of you curious, the code was (this works):

RewriteRule ^feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/MichiKnows [L,NC]

In non-nerd terms, it meant all default blog software accessing my website would be automatically forwarded to FeedBurner. This is good because it centralizes my reader base so I can track how many I have. Unfortunately, I was dumb and forgot that FeedBurner scans my RSS feed to generate its version of it.

That meant after about six hours, my feed completely broke when I made FeedBurner go in an infinite loop. 🙁

I’ll take a second shot at this problem later, but for now, I’ll concede and put things back to the way there were. Thanks J.M. for pointing out this issue!

Update: My friend pointed me to this plugin. It is very easy to install, so I’ll leave my hacker ambitions alone for this task and use it instead.