Vladville is Back

Woohoo, bigger and better than ever. Over the weekend I finally threw away Google's Blogger service and ported all of my posts and comments over to my own servers. The upside is that there are a whole lot more features and things I can do with Vladville now that I could not do with Blogger. The downside: spam. I feel its a good tradeoff and I am sure it will be easier to handle than all the downtime and mistakes Blogger used to make.

So here it is – fully powered by WordPress on CentOS Linux 4.3. There is still a Windows 2003 box behind the SBS Show for media streaming but that will soon either disappear or be upgraded, I have not fully decided how I'll be streaming future media content off Vladville – but you can bet there will be a LOT!

The move was very simple. Porting the Vladville theme to WordPress was less than amusing but after seeing what this can do I will be changing the theme again to something more Web 2.0ish. I would like to thank my friend Pablo Averbuj for helping me out yesterday with Apache Rewrites. You see, Blogger publishes the Atom XML as /rss/vladville.xml – its something thats in thousands and thousands of RSS feeds out there. Well, WordPress publishes feeds as /feed/rss2 or /?feed=rss. Since there was no way to do an internal redirect that would work here is the actual Rewrite rule Pablo came up with:

 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss/vladville.xml /index.php?feed=rss2 [P,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

The interesting rule is the one that is matching requests to /rss/vladville.xml and redirecting them to /index.php?feed=rss2. We tried this over and over and over again and could not get it to do internal redirection. Finally Pablo threw in a P in there (for proxy) and it works. What more can you ask for?  Here is an interesting conversation we had after we decided it was good enough:

Pablo: So you're returning RSS2 but aren't they expecting Atom?

Vlad: Yes.

Pablo: Eh, F em if they can't take a joke 🙂

So if your feed is broken happy belated April Fools day. For different feeds from Vladville (if its broken) use the following:

http://www.vladville.com/feed/rss2

http://www.vladville.com/feed/atom

That ought to do it!