Following up on last week's thoughts on feed confusion and multiple XML feed formats, Nick Bradbury offered a handy tip in the comments that I've implemented here for this site.

And I quote Nick's comment, which I think it worth repeating here in its own entry, for those that want to also trim down to one feed flavor:

If later on you find that a different format offers something you need, switch to it and permanently redirect (HTTP 301) the old feed to the new one. Most aggregators will automatically update a feed's stored URL when a permanent redirect is encountered.

So, I've trimmed down the feeds for SimpleBits, now offering only RSS 2.0. This is partly for simplicity -- I find the RSS format a bit more human readable than Atom, although I respect the latter's reason for existing, and it could potentially replace RSS in the future.

Not wanting to abandon Atom subscribers completely, I've taken Nick's advice, doing some quick research and adding the following to the root .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /xml/atom.xml http://www.simplebits.com/xml/rss.xml

I'm told this will let any user agent know that this feed's location has changed permantly to the RSS 2.0's location (I have two other similar rules, one for each of the three feed options).

Now there's one flavor. Simple. With that in mind, one may also want to investigate Feedburner as an uncomplicated way of offering multiple feed formats without worrying about templates, as many have suggested. Doug Bowman has also just written about Feedburner, offering an .htaccess solution for pointing multiple existing feed URLs to a single Feedburner URL.

And the feed goes on.