410 Annoying #

Russell has stopped blogging, and seems to want people to unsubscribe from his feed. Not content to only return a 410 Gone status code*, he has also inserted a seizure-inducing image into a item with an ever-changing GUID. I'm not sure if this falls under "clever social hack" (since not all aggregators support 410 - including Reader to some degree) or "ugly perversion of HTTP."

* The Reader crawl logs suggest that initially his "unsubscribe now" feed was returning a 200 status code, which made this less interesting.

5 Comments

I just saw that myself. What a dick. If anything, inserting the obnoxious images makes me want to not only retain the feed but pound his server with requests just for spite.
I find it amusing that he still has the RSS feed as a 'link' in the head of his web site - and linked to in the header, making it appear like a normal, sane, feed - until you actually try to read it.
It's good to know that I wasn't the only one that was totally annoyed by that flashing image. For all of the complaining (http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008765.html) he's done in the past, you would think that he would do this the right way.
It's extremely annoying of him. Grrrr.
Check out: Force Apache to output any HTTP Status Code with ErrorDocument

I setup an automated system to view all 57 Apache Response codes and ErrorDocuments, saving the headers and returned content for future reference. Use this page as a reference when designing scripts that use headers. Ex: 404 Not Found, 200 OK, 304 Not-Modified, 506 Service Temporarily Unavailable, etc.

When a Status code is encountered, Apache serves the header and the ErrorDocument for the error code. So if you can see any Header and ErrorDocument by causing that error on Apache.

For instance, if you request a file that doesn’t exist, a 404 Not Found is issued and the corresponding ErrorDocument is served with the 404 Not Found Header. So we can see what Apache 404 Errors and Response Codes look like, but how do we cause errors for the 56 other Apache Response Codes?

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