Fixing My Feed From Sacha

I’ve been following Sacha Chua for a long time. I think I started while she was still at University but it was certainly shortly afterwards at the latest. She’s been at it for about 25 years so it’s hard for me to remember. During that time I’ve had her in my RSS/Atom feed and read her posts in various feed readers.

These days, of course, I’m using Elfeed but she still pops up regularly in my feed. The other day, I was reading her post on Emacs People for the latest Emacs Carnival and I noticed that she wrote in both French and English. That seemed new so I poked around a bit a discovered that it’s another of her ongoing projects, just like my learning Spanish¹. The thing is, I had never seen any other posts in or about French from her. Then I realized that all the posts I’ve been seeing from her were actually coming from Planet Emacslife. What was going on? I checked and, sure enough, her blog was in my feed list. After fiddling around for a bit I tried following the link I had for her in my feed and got a 404 but I had no problem finding the feed directly from her site. I checked it against what her site had and it seemed the same. Then I noticed that on the 404 page there was a %20 at the end of the URL. Aha! There was a space at the end of the URL I was using. I wouldn’t think that would matter but when I removed it, things started working again.

So the moral of this long story is that if you’re having trouble getting the RSS/Atom entries from some site, check to be sure you don’t have a space at the end of the URL. It’s easy to see how it could happen even if you know what you’re doing, and once made, it’s hard to see with a casual glance at things.

Anyway, I’m back to getting all Sacha’s posts now. Too bad that I don’t remember a lot of the French I learned as a result of one of those annoying foreign language requirements in graduate school.