commit e3032e9ee0ae4e46b28938a4359fe345a0f29b13
parent 995eb259cb1bcb4fd71b6cffc5df5642f05a5f0d
Author: Beau <cbeauhilton@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2022 16:13:24 -0600
mime types post, feed, add to index
Diffstat:
3 files changed, 103 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml
@@ -9,7 +9,14 @@
<generator>my own two hands</generator>
<managingEditor>beau@beauhilton.com (Beau Hilton)</managingEditor>
<webMaster>beau@beauhilton.com (Beau Hilton)</webMaster>
- <lastBuildDate>2022-11-11T00:00:01Z</lastBuildDate>
+ <lastBuildDate>2022-11-13T00:00:01Z</lastBuildDate>
+ <item>
+ <title>fix MIME Types to unbreak RSS feeds served by OpenBSD's httpd(8)</title>
+ <link>https://beauhilton.com/posts/mime.html</link>
+ <guid>https://beauhilton.com/posts/mime.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>2022-11-13T15:04:26Z</pubDate>
+ <description>Add more MIME Types to `httpd(8)` so RSS feed readers know what they're getting into.</description>
+ </item>
<item>
<title>upgrade old OpenBSD installs</title>
<link>https://beauhilton.com/posts/ugbsd.html</link>
diff --git a/posts.md b/posts.md
@@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
# Posts
+## [fix MIME Types to unbreak RSS feeds served by OpenBSD's httpd(8)](posts/mime.html)
+
## [upgrade old OpenBSD installs](posts/ugbsd.html)
## [geocheatcode](posts/geocheatcode.html)
diff --git a/posts/mime.md b/posts/mime.md
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+# fix MIME Types to unbreak RSS feeds served by OpenBSD's httpd(8)
+
+
+## RSS is life - but mine was broken
+
+
+As of today (2022-11-13) my website lives on
+an OpenBSD server hosted at [vultr](https://vultr.com).
+
+It's great, delightfully simple and low-resource,
+robust, extendable, low-maintenance.
+
+I've been getting back into RSS lately.
+Turns out, my own RSS feed was broken.
+I knew it was janky, but would have had no idea how broken it was
+if not for the great folks
+on the [datasette](https://datasette.io) Discord,
+one of whom reached out to let me know my RSS link wasn't working.
+
+This could not stand!
+
+I've been meaning to fix my RSS feed anyway,
+and now I had a good reason.
+
+
+## fixing the file itself
+
+
+I ended up tearing out my previous RSS solution, [`rssg`](https://romanzolotarev.com/rssg.html),which is great but made some assumptions about my site's layout that aren't true.
+I could have rewritten the script,
+but I'm lazy and a little strapped for time,
+so I ended up replacing it with a hand-written RSS file.
+
+(The RSS spec is easy enough to write by hand,
+a little copy-paste and replace to add a new article -
+at some point I'll probably migrate to `hugo` or similar
+and hand off the feed creation to a more flexible script,
+but for now this works).
+
+After I was certain the file format was fine and had the info I wanted,
+I thought I was good.
+
+
+## fixing the MIME Type
+
+
+The kind soul who reached out to let me know the RSS feed was malformed
+reached out again to let me know he was now getting a MIME Type error.
+
+My feedreader of choice, `newsboat`,
+is very forgiving of what it accepts,
+and didn't throw any errors when I tested it.
+`FreshRSS`, on the other hand, is more strict,
+and the feed would fail even though the file itself was fine.
+
+I looked into it, and found out that `httpd(8)`
+only supports a handful of MIME Types by default,
+so my server was sending out `application/octet-stream`
+(a generic type) instead of the `rss+xml` type,
+and it was confusing the feedreader.
+
+
+## add all the types
+
+
+Thank goodness, and as usual in OpenBSD,
+there's a very easy way to add all the relevant types one might need.
+
+OpenBSD has an internal MIME declaration file you can link to from within `httpd.conf(5)`.
+
+Here's the relevant bit, just chuck this on the end of the conf file:
+
+```
+types {
+ include "/usr/share/misc/mime.types"
+}
+```
+
+And reload `httpd(8)`.
+
+
+## great success
+
+
+Much thanks to my new friend on the Datasette Discord,
+the fantastic OpenBSD documentation,
+as always,
+and [lambda.cx](https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/openbsd-httpd-mime-types/)
+for writing a post almost identical to mine
+(except that his had nothing to do with RSS -
+he was fixing PDF serving,
+which should now be fixed on my site as well).
+
