The BBC need a TARDIS to transport their Doctor Who RSS URLs

There was an astonishing message in the official BBC Doctor Who News RSS feed yesterday:

Now that we've switched over to our shiny new site, our news stories are being created in a different way. Therefore you'll no longer see news stories added to this page.

Instead, you'll find them if you follow the link below.

More importantly, if you subscribe to our RSS news feed using the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/syndication/rss091.xml

you'll need to update it to:

http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss.xml

That way you'll be able to keep up with the latest official news on the show

Now, I'm an old hand at trying to cope with legacy systems, but really? The BBC can't simply re-direct requests for http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/syndication/rss091.xml to http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss.xml automatically?

As far as I can tell, between Bloglines and Google Reader alone, the Doctor Who feed has over 1,500 subscribers. All of whom the BBC is making edit their subscription, rather than the BBC editing one line in a httpd.conf or .htaccess file or writing their own RSS re-write solution or however they choose to re-direct.

Plus, since the BBC only publishes partial feed content, the message announcing this change wasn't even explicit for RSS users. Subscribers were told:

Time to update, if you want to be updated.

which isn't exactly directly explaining 'You need to change your RSS subscription right this instant'

Moan, moan, moan eh? Still, it isn't all bad. I see the site now appears to have potentially stable URLs for each episode, and when viewed in advance they redirect to the most recently transmitted episode. Try http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/episodes/S4_05 today, and you get sent to the S4_03 page for Planet Of The Ood. I'm impressed with that at least.

You might also be interested in some of my other articles that feature Doctor Who:

Currybet's law - 5 reasons why Doctor Who always crops up in BBC meetings - March 2009
Unpacking the TARDIS - November 2008
Doctor Who and The Pirates - March 2008
"The Tardis and Multiplatform" - Julie Gardner talks about Doctor Who's multi-media incarnations - September 2007
Doctor Who and the Vanishing Plaques - August 2007
Why my Doctor Who blog failed - July 2007
Putting a F__k Off Dalek on the BBC Homepage isn't big or clever - July 2005
The Making of Doctor Who Webcasts - August 2004

Posted by Martin Belam, April 23, 2008    
Read the latest posts about: BBC, Doctor Who, RSS
The views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former clients or employers. Read my blogging principles
 Get free updates via RSS       Get free updates by email       Follow Martin Belam on Twitter