This morning, I woke up with a flurry of emails in my inbox. When people tried to read my blog's RSS feed, they got an error like this: This should no

MIME, RSS, and existential torment

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2024-06-23 18:30:16

This morning, I woke up with a flurry of emails in my inbox. When people tried to read my blog's RSS feed, they got an error like this:

This should not happen. When I first encountered this, I had to do a double-take. When I remade my website for version 4 I did make some weird technical decisions and I figured one of those was coming back to bite me. One of the weirdest things my website does is that it serves everything from a .zip file. As far as I understand my blog, here's what I expect to happen when somebody requests a file:

When someone fetches a file I expect it to interact with the lume FileSystem component, pass it to the zip file, get a file back, and then serve it back to the user with happy puppies and HTTP 200 responses. This was not happening, and the error that I got was initially very confusing.

The actual reason why this was happening trolled me so hard that I felt the need to write about it so that y'all are able to understand all of the moving parts and why it failed in this way in particular.