Thanks to the assistance of Dan and Steven I was able to identify a problem with the RSS feeds from this server.
Technically the problem was with the newsreaders (in Steven’s case Straw and in Dan’s case NewzCrawler), not the RSS feed itself. I turned on gzip compression on my Apache server about three weeks ago to preserve bandwidth. In theory, user-agents like web browsers and RSS readers should be able to either send a “Accept-Encoding: gzip” header and accept compressed data, or, if they don’t, be sent the original non-compressed data.
Somehow this mechanism was causing problems for Steven and Dan and their RSS readers (although it didn’t affect NetNewsWire, which is what I use). For the time being, I’ve turned off compression, and this appears to have solved the problem.
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email.
Comments
“Sprocket??? I thought you
“Sprocket??? I thought you said “SOCKET”! Hello? Is this thing on?”
It was also causing problems
It was also causing problems with Bloglines
Also for Firebirds RSS Reader
Also for Firebirds RSS Reader Panel.
Hmm. And I was thinking of
Hmm. And I was thinking of turning mod_gzip on for my site, since I was rudely informed by the web page analyzer
http://www.websiteoptimization…
that my page _badly_ needed to get on the SlimFast diet. Since I’ve only used NetNewWire myself, I never thought of the consequences for poorly-written RSS aggregators like the ones listed above. Perhaps I’ll rethink that dietary supplement.
Add new comment