Sometimes when you have to look through other people’s work all you can do is shake your head. Sometimes people will use your thing in a way that is completely nonsensical and get mad when it doesn’t work or when it backfires. Sometimes the only thing you can do is write all of it down for your sanity and my amusement.

Brent Simmons posted Brian Reischl’s Stupid [RSS] Feed Tricks and it’s making me feel better about some projects at work. A few of my favorites follow.

Headshake: > Using permanent redirects for temporary errors. In one instance, all the Microsoft blogs had a temporary system error. All the feeds did a permanent redirect to the same system error page, and we updated all 40,000 feeds to point to that one URL. Whoops.

Ugh: > Declaring the document as ISO-8859-1 encoding, but actually using UTF-8, with some Arabic characters in it.

I can just imagine debugging that one—my face would have made parallelograms. One more: > Specifying dates in whatever their language’s “Date.ToString()” spits out. eg, “Tuesday, March 31st, Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand And Twelve, 4:59 PM”

Let this be inspiration to document all your facepalms for the benefit of others.