RSS was Down, Now Back Up, with Atom (Shallow Thoughts)

RSS was Down, Now Back Up, with Atom

A reader pointed out to me that the RSS page on my blog hadn't been updated since May.

That must be when I updated PyBlosxom to the latest version and switched to the python3 branch. Python 2, as you probably know, is no longer going to be supported starting sometime next year (the exact date in 2020 doesn't seem to be set). Anyway, PyBlosxom was one of the few tools I use that still depend only on Python 2, and since I saw they had a python3 branch, I tried it.

PyBlosxom is no longer a project in active development: as I understand it, some of the developers drifted off to other blogging systems, others decided that it worked well enough and didn't really need further tweaking. But someone, at some point, did make a try at porting it to Python 3; and when I tried the python3 branch, I was able to make it work after I made a couple of very minor tweaks (which I contributed back to the project on GitHub, and they were accepted).

Everything went fine for a few months, until I received the alert that the index.rss and index.rss20 files weren't being generated. Curiously, the RSS files for each individual post are still there; just not the index.rss and index.rss20.

I found there was already a bug filed on that. I tried the workaround mentioned in the bug, at the same time adding Atom to the RSS 0.9.1 and RSS 2.0 flavors I've had in the past. I haven't generated Atom for all the old entries, but any new entries starting now should be available as Atom.

Fingers crossed! if you're reading this, then it worked and my RSS pages are back. Sorry about the RSS hiatus.