I switched my Blogger account to the beta of the new version today, republished one of my feeds, checked it to make sure it was in Atom "1.0" format (yeah!), validated it at feedvalidator.org, and to my surprise, got this warning: "Self reference doesn't match document location". I checked the feed, and sure enough, the "self" link pointed to a copy of the feed on Blogger's website. Huh? What's up with that?

In case you're not familiar with the "self" link, here's what the Atom spec has to say about it:

atom:feed elements SHOULD contain one atom:link element with a rel attribute value of "self". This is the preferred URI for retrieving Atom Feed Documents representing this Atom feed.

What that means is that if someone subscribes to my feed from my site, their feed reader may (this behavior isn't required, but is certainly hinted at) subscribe to the copy on Blogger's website instead of the one on mine. I guess that's good and bad.

It's good because if my blog gets wildly popular, I don't have to pay for the bandwidth for serving my feed.

It's bad because I have no way of knowing about people who are subscribed to the Blogger-hosted copy of my feed, so my stats aren't going to be accurate.

That said, I don't know that I really care that much--not at this point anyway. But I'd like to at least have the option to have that link point to the feed hosted on my site.