Soldier Ant 

Just a note, in case anybody cares. I've been taking a bit of a new approach to Soldier Ant lately, and I'm trying to clean up some small bits of the site that have been nagging me for awhile. (Rather than doing my usual bit, and endlessly working on a grand 'redesign' that I never actually ship.) So tonight, I spent about an hour tending to the site's feed functionality (again!)

I've known for some time that Movable Type has been generating RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom feeds for the site (even though my officially endorsed feed is one that is provided by Feedburner. And it was those feeds that were linked to for autodiscovery purposes, instead of the Feedburner one. And to make matters worse, there were several places on the site (most notably all of the individual archives pages for entries) that pointed to them as well.

Of course, for anyone who had been subscribing to those feeds, instead of the Feedburner one.. well, that's fine. You should've been getting a fairly accurate syndicated version of the site. (The Feedburner version just incorporates more doodads and hoo-ha, like Flickr pictures and - sometimes - my bookmarks.) Anyway, all of the different feed options were really starting to bug me, especially since Firefox 2.0 has improved support for subscriptions: i wanted to make sure that the right feed (the Feedburner one) was featured consistently throughout the site, and included on all pages as the one and only auto-discovery option. So that's what I did tonight.

In addition, I set up some .htaccess redirects, so that anyone who'd previously been getting one of the old RSS or Atom feeds should now (transparently) instead get the Feedburner feed. Why do I care? Because I'd like to start getting a more accurate idea of the number of subscribers. Anyway, this is a pretty rambling and extremely boring entry, so I'll end it now.