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.
Posted by Martin Belam, April 23, 2008
Read the latest posts on currybetdotnet 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.
Get free updates via RSS
Get free updates by email
Follow Martin Belam on Twitter
Search this site
Posts of the moment
"Michael Jackson's death spares the BBC"
What would have been on Friday's front pages.
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic
An article based on my presentation at May's International Social Media Summit.
"London IA Mini II"
My write-up of the recent London IA Mini Conference at the Sense Loft in London.
Around the site
or any current or former employers or clients.
Contact: martin dot belam at currybet dot net
©2009 Martin Belam where appropriate. Powered by Movable Type. Hosted by Bytemark.
Manufactured in Great Britain.
2 comments so far
As feed publishing becomes more prevalent the best way to do this is to have feed based domain names, so http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss.xml
becomes http://doctorwho.feeds.bbc.co.uk which is almost shorter than the original! Then if the feed address changes the user doesn't need to know anything about it. By the way I like your CAPTCHA :-)
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why they didn't want to re-direct from the old URL, but it just seems a really bad call. These are the most dedicated users of your service that you are messing about.