About my RSS Feed (Updated)

I usually avoid writing blog posts about my blog, but I think this time I have to make an exception. If you're accessing the ignorethecode.net RSS feed using a feed reader which marks changed items as "new", you've been getting an awful lot of items wrongly marked as "new" in the last few days. Here's why.

A few days ago, on August 25th, my blog software suddenly decided to eat all of my blog posts. My awesome web hoster nine.ch quickly fixed the problem by restoring from a recent backup. In order to avoid similar problems in the future, I consequently decided to replace my blog software with a custom homegrown blogging tool. This would also allow me to easily add new features to my blog. On the 28th, I replaced my old blogging tool with my own app.

Since then, I've been making small tweaks to various parts of the site, fixing bugs and adding some additional features. I've also made several changes to the RSS feed. The switch to a new blogging engine and these changes may have accidentally repeatedly marked some or all old RSS items as "new" in some feed readers, and I apologize for this.

I think I'm happy with the RSS feed now, and I don't plan on making additional changes to it. If you've been seeing RSS items being wrongly marked as "new", you should see no more of that.

Update: I'm awfully sorry, but I've done it again. I've changed the footer, thereby creating a bunch of unread items in certain popular newsreaders whose names shall remain confidential. The fact that some newsreaders show RSS items with even a single changed word as "new" is incredibly debilitating to me. On the one hand, I want to keep improving the feed and fix issues as I come across them; similarly, I typically keep refactoring articles after I publish them, changing sentences for more clarity as well as fixing typos. On the other hand, I don't want to annoy you by constantly making the items in my RSS feed appear as unread.

I'm really not sure how to proceed. As a first change, effective immediately, I have changed the number of items in my RSS feed from 30 to 12; if the problem occurs again, at least now you will at most get 12 unread items.