Jason Liu's Personal Website

Today, I finished a complete revamping of my blog. The structure now matches much more closely to those of "real" blogs out on the Web. This should make it easier for me if at some point in the future, I decide to migrate my entire blog into a database server. Also, it also allows me to automate the blog as an Atom or RSS feed without any extra effort. Before, I had to duplicate all of the blog entries for the feed, because feeds have to be structured using a subset of XML, whereas what is seen on the webpages has to be presented in (X)HTML.

The one downside to my new infrastructure, though, is that you get a warning if you try to validate my feed. This is because the new system uses SSI to generate the feed document on-the-fly. But since the University of Michigan Web servers — where my website currently resides — has not set up a way of specifying XML files that contains SSI code, I have had to generate the feed as if it were XHTML. Thus, when you try to validate my feed, the Web server serves up the feed with an HTML MIME-type, instead of an XML MIME-type like it should. Less than ideal, perhaps, but I decided that this is a price I'm willing to pay for the time being, rather than shelling out the money to buy a computer and spending the time to set up my own Web server.