codehosting now supports feedburner
I just posted a new version of my codehosting project for django
which supports passing the Atom feeds for release updates through feedburner.com. There isn’t
anything tying the implementation to FeedBurner, of course, but since
that’s why I wanted the feature that’s how I am describing it.
One tricky bit was I wanted all of the existing subscribers to my
feed(s) to be redirected to the FeedBurner URL. I couldn’t just add a
redirect rule in Apache, since not all of the feeds are set up with
FeedBurner yet. So I opted for letting the django code handle the
redirection. If a project has an external_feed property that is not
null, that value is used as the URL for feeds for the project. So when
someone accesses the old URL for the codehosting release feed
(http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/feed/atom/codehosting/) they
are redirected to
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DougHellmann-codehosting instead. And
FeedBurner looks at
http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/local_feed/atom/codehosting/,
which always produces the Atom content locally.
The “local_feed” URL is never included in any templates, so no web crawlers should ever find it by themselves.
This is one of those cases where I had thought to include this feature from the beginning, since migrating the existing readers of the feed(s) required this hackish change. But, it looks like it is working. I would be interested in any feedback anyone else might have on other ways I could have handled the redirects.