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     33     <h1>
     34      fix MIME Types to unbreak RSS feeds served by OpenBSD’s
     35 httpd(8)
     36     </h1>
     37     <p>
     38      <time id="post-date">2022-11-13</time>
     39     </p>
     40     <h2>
     41      RSS is life - but mine was broken
     42     </h2>
     43     <p>
     44      As of today (2022-11-13) my website lives on an OpenBSD server hosted
     45 at <a href="https://vultr.com">vultr</a>.
     46     </p>
     47     <p>
     48      It’s great, delightfully simple and low-resource, robust, extendable,
     49 low-maintenance.
     50     </p>
     51     <p id="post-excerpt">
     52      I've been getting back into RSS lately.
     53 Turns out, my own RSS feed was broken.
     54     </p>
     55     <p>
     56      I knew it was janky, but would have had no idea how broken it was if
     57 not for the great folks on the <a href="https://datasette.io">datasette</a> Discord, one of whom reached
     58 out to let me know my RSS link wasn’t working.
     59     </p>
     60     <p>
     61      This could not stand!
     62     </p>
     63     <p>
     64      I’ve been meaning to fix my RSS feed anyway, and now I had a good
     65 reason.
     66     </p>
     67     <h2>
     68      fixing the file itself
     69     </h2>
     70     <p>
     71      I ended up tearing out my previous RSS solution, <a href="https://romanzolotarev.com/rssg.html"><code>rssg</code></a>, which
     72 is great but made some assumptions about my site’s layout that aren’t
     73 true. I could have rewritten the script, but I’m lazy and a little
     74 strapped for time, so I ended up replacing it with a hand-written RSS
     75 file.
     76     </p>
     77     <p>
     78      (The RSS spec is easy enough to write by hand, a little copy-paste
     79 and replace to add a new article - at some point I’ll probably migrate
     80 to <code>hugo</code> or similar and hand off the feed creation to a more
     81 flexible script, but for now this works).
     82     </p>
     83     <p>
     84      After I was certain the file format was fine and had the info I
     85 wanted, I thought I was good.
     86     </p>
     87     <h2>
     88      fixing the MIME Type
     89     </h2>
     90     <p>
     91      The kind soul who reached out to let me know the RSS feed was
     92 malformed reached out again to let me know he was now getting a MIME
     93 Type error.
     94     </p>
     95     <p>
     96      My feedreader of choice, <code>newsboat</code>, is very forgiving of
     97 what it accepts, and didn’t throw any errors when I tested it.
     98 <code>FreshRSS</code>, on the other hand, is more strict, and the feed
     99 would fail even though the file itself was fine.
    100     </p>
    101     <p>
    102      I looked into it, and found out that <code>httpd(8)</code> only
    103 supports a handful of MIME Types by default, so my server was sending
    104 out <code>application/octet-stream</code> (a generic type) instead of
    105 the <code>rss+xml</code> type, and it was confusing the feedreader.
    106     </p>
    107     <h2>
    108      add all the types
    109     </h2>
    110     <p>
    111      Thank goodness, and as usual in OpenBSD, there’s a very easy way to
    112 add all the relevant types one might need.
    113     </p>
    114     <p>
    115      OpenBSD has an internal MIME declaration file you can link to from
    116 within <code>httpd.conf(5)</code>.
    117     </p>
    118     <p>
    119      Here’s the relevant bit, just chuck this on the end of the conf
    120 file:
    121     </p>
    122     <pre tabindex="0"><code class="language-shell">
    123 types {
    124     include "/usr/share/misc/mime.types"
    125 }
    126 </code></pre>
    127     <p>
    128      And reload <code>httpd(8)</code>.
    129     </p>
    130     <h2>
    131      great success
    132     </h2>
    133     <p>
    134      Much thanks to my new friend on the Datasette Discord, the fantastic
    135 OpenBSD documentation, as always, and <a href="https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/openbsd-httpd-mime-types/">lambda.cx</a>
    136 for writing a post almost identical to mine (except that his had nothing
    137 to do with RSS - he was fixing PDF serving, which should now be fixed on
    138 my site as well).
    139     </p>
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