What will happen to my RSS feeds

Hi

I have multiple Websites running on a VPS with nginx and serving 6 years of podcasts. I intend to get a certificate for each site, but what will happen with the feeds I setup and point to the HTTP site? If I change the link in my feeds for the HTTPS site, will it reset the feeds and resend everything to everybody?

Sorry if this question has been asked before, I searched and found nothing. I’m pretty well knowledged with nginx, websites and VPS, but when it comes to my feeds, I’m always scared to make changes that would disrupt my listeners.

Thanks for your help

In most cases, deploying certificates and setting up https does not interfere with (unencrypted) http. It's up to the operator to decide whether or not http requests will be redirected to https.

If you use post numbers or UUIDS as an identifier in your RSS feeds and not solely URLs, most RSS clients will continue to mark the old entries as read, even when the URLs change, since they can key off that identifier instead.

If your RSS feed does not contain a post id number or UUID for each post, most RSS clients would not be able to identify the updated URLs as belonging to the same posts, and would re-display everything as new again.

1 Like

Thanks for your reply.

I forgot to mention that I am using Feedburner, so my listeners feeds are linked with Feedburner, So, I would only have to change the original feed link (pointing to my site) in Feedburner, but I do not know if this will disrupt all the feeds.

Otherwise, is it possible to have a mix of HTTP ans HTTPS on the same site? The site itsselffor the visitors would be HTTPS but Feedburner would point to my site using HTTP?

Thanks

Yes, this is basically the default behavior of the web. However, we usually encourage people to set a redirect, where the web server replies to HTTP requests not with the content of the page but with an HTTP 301 redirection message that says to go to the HTTPS equivalent. The user experience of this is that even if the user types in "http://" or follows an HTTP link or doesn't use any protocol schema at all (like just typing in "example.com"), the page itself will load over HTTPS (because the browser immediately and automatically follows the redirection). If you want to keep some resources in HTTP, you can either not create this redirection, or make an exception to the redirection for URLs that are directly associated with your RSS feed—so that the RSS readers won't be told to switch to HTTPS when they access those URLs.

The means of creating redirections and of creating exceptions to redirections are very specific to your web server software and/or hosting environment (but there are often people on this forum who are pretty knowledgeable about this).

Certbot does offer to create a blanket site-wide HTTP → HTTPS redirection at the end of the initial certificate installation (which it calls the "Secure" option as opposed to the "Easy" option, because it ordinarily results in more people using the site in HTTPS all of the time).

Thanks for your reply. I will look into nginx for creating an exception to redirections for my feed and install encryption site wide.

I will mark this thread as solved

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