I will write about my experiences when time permits, but for now how about this… blogging from TextMate. That’s right, this post was written and posted from inside TM!

There is no “undo” button when posting a comment to someone else’s weblog.

Stumbling upon a post offering what I thought was a bad piece of advice, I felt compelled to inflict my personal opinion on the site owner. While in a particularly bad mood, I posted a rebuttal through the host’s commenting system. The comment was impersonal, terse, and quite rude. The moment I pressed the “post” button, that little voice inside my head, whispered, “What a jerk!” (I’m not entirely sure that’s what the little voice said… I was trying to ignore it).

While checking my referrer logs, I noticed 2 visits from the site where I posted the comment. The site owner added two comments to the post, the first discounting my comment, and the second blasting my site for some apparent design flaws, and a violation of my own original “advice”. The tone of the comments was deservedly not flattering. I attempted to apologize, but found myself banned from the system (a first).

I officially regret posting the original comment, not because the post’s author attacked me, but because the comment’s tone and demeanor was out of character for me. The comment was not representative of who I am (I’d like to think), or how I wish to treat people.

Here’s what I learned:

• The Internet provides a level of anonymity, even when authoring a post or comment using your real name (which I always do). This impersonal communication medium can remove inhibitions, and emotional restraints that should prevent you from writing (saying) things you would not normally say to someone in person… especially someone you just met.

• Opinions are just that, opinions. And you know what they say about opinions… right? The exchange of ideas and opinions is relevant and productive. The Internet, and especially weblogs, are designed to foster community. Discussion does not have to be personal or inflammatory, even when expressing fact in the face of falsehood or error. Discussion can and should be kept civil and tactful.

• Check your bad mood at the door. Just because you are having a bad day, doesn’ t give you the right to ruin someone else’s. Consider how your feelings might affect what you are about to post in response to someone’s thought or ideas. Good advice for the real world too.

• Weblogs are not faceless, emotionless, unfeeling nodes in the cloud. Behind each weblog is a real, emotion rich, feeling person. The author often has poured out heart and soul into each post, carefully crafting and documenting a record of their own experiences, personal thoughts and feelings, or what they believe to be good advice. Be kind, be tactful, practice the Golden Rule. Don’t be a troll, especially when that is not your intention.

To the author of that original post: If by some chance you read this, please accept my sincere apology. If my stupidity and lack of restraint hurt your feelings, I am sorry; please forgive me.

To everyone else, remember:

There is no “undo” button when posting a comment to someone else’s weblog.

It also kills two birds with one stone: participate in the del.icio.us community AND update your blog daily with one del.icio.us post.

This is a “no-hassle” solution done completely through your del.icio.us account. I tried this initially on this blog, but later switched to yadd for a more flexible solution. I made some minor modifications to meet my needs, including a change to the post title, and the automatic creation of tag hyperlinks.

Here’s the catch. Most content management systems like WordPress generate several feeds in a variety of flavors, each linked to your site via a <link> element like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" 
    href="http://www.example.com/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" 
    href="http://www.example.com/feed/rss/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" 
    href="http://www.example.com/feed/atom/" />

Every newsreader that uses auto-discovery to subscribe to your feed, gets the URL for your feed from these <link> elements, completely ignoring the cute little FeedBurner button you proudly display on your page.

Assuming the FeedBurner URL to your new feed is, “mywildfeed”, you could simply change each element to look something like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" 
    href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/mywildfeed" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" 
    href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/mywildfeed" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" 
    href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/mywildfeed" />

But changing <link> elements has a downside:
# An upgrade to your CMS could overwrite your template reverting the href attribute to it’s previous value
# If you decide to stop using FeedBurner, you could have a large subscriber base that would need to re-subscribe using a new URL.

You could create a new feed for FeedBurner to consume (not exposed in a <link> element), and use an Apache redirect to point request for your old feeds to your new FeedBurner feed as outlined in this post, but you are subject to the same disadvantages as the previous example.

Solution

To avoid some of the faults with the methods listed above, I choose to use Apache mod_rewrite directives to redirect requests for any feeds straight to FeedBurner. A couple of entries in .htaccess are all you need¹:

# FeedBurner Redirect
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.? [NC]
RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)?/? 

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mywildfeed[R,L]

If you are playing along at home, we’ll look at the important entries and explain what’s going on.

First we use RewriteCond to make sure that the user agent requesting the feed is not the FeedBurner bot². This is significant, because if it is FeedBurner, we do not want to redirect, or we effectively create a circumstance where the service consumes itself (ugly).

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.? [NC]

Now, and only if the condition above is true, the RewriteRule that does the real work:

RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)?/? 

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mywildfeed[R,L]

Without going into a long-winded tutorial on regular expressions, this rule catches the request for any feed offered by WordPress, and redirects it to the FeedBurner URL.

Benefits

There a several benefits to this solution, most notably:
# It doesn’t matter how a reader is subscribed to a feed, they are quietly whisked away to the FeedBurner URL when ready to consume.
# Since the regular expression in the RewriteRule catches all the ways feeds are available in typical <link> elements, you need not worry about changing your template.
# To discontinue using FeedBurner, or change to a similar service, simply eliminate or modify the entries in the .htaccess file.

All of this adds up to a solution that is easy to maintain, and never results in a disruption to the subscriber base.

References

Inspiration for this article was found in many places. Here are some other articles you might want to read:
* Apache Module mod_rewrite
* WordPress FeedBurner Plugin
* Why Redirecting Your Feed Isn’t Such a Great Idea
* Ciao, FeedBurner

Footnotes

¹ Keep in mind I use WordPress to power my blog, you may require slightly different syntax.

² I know, the RewriteCond is actually parsed after the RewriteRule… I’m trying to keep it simple!