WordPress and HTTP Conditional GET

I was looking at my logs, because I was seeing a lot of traffic on my XML feeds. Clichéd, perhaps, after the Microsoft debacle :-). I was looking because my RSS2 feed had risen to the top of the daily traffic statistics.

I did notice that many aggregators still aren’t using Conditional GET, and that some others don’t support gzip. But that wasn’t it… Instead, a full 25% of hits resulted in HTTP Code 302 (not modified), and yet were _also_ transferring the full RSS feed (sometimes compressed, sometimes not). Digging in the code, I found (in the Conditional GET logic in wp-blog-header.php):

I moved the exit to the right place, and now all my Conditional GET clients are downloading 0 bytes :-). Here’s the fixed version:


posted at 8:58 am on Thursday, September 30, 2004 in Programming, Site News | Comments (4)

4 Comments

  1. Reid says:
    2004-09-30 at 12:11

    I use “wget” to download my RSS feeds onto tnir to produce my news.tnir.org page. Now wget has an option, “-N, --timestamping that tells it ” don’t re-retrieve files unless newer than local”. However, I also use another option, “--output-file=FILE” because I don’t want 200 files named “index.html“. When you use that option, it turns off the time-stamping feature. Bleaugh.

    I downloaded the code to see if I could fix it, but it turns out that the code is structured in such a way that redirecting the output is a major fork in the code path. *sigh. Maybe one day I’ll get around to it..

  2. Reid says:
    2004-09-30 at 16:33

    Whoah, some of my HTML leaked through there. The comments info says bold tags are allowed, and I certainly did not type any “del” tags..

  3. Harald says:
    2004-09-30 at 18:44

    Apparently Textile is processing comments, too; text surrounded by “-” is marked with del tags, and text surrounded by + is marked with ins tags.

    Seems to be haphazard though, esp. since it appears that textile is adding tags, and then the HTML sanitizer is stripping (some of) them out…

  4. Traffic Statistics Webmaster says:
    2004-10-04 at 05:19

    Hi Harald,

    just stumbled about your blog and found a nasty bug there:
    You got a self signed SSL cert for some parts of your blog, if a user doesn’t accept the self signed cert, your blog layout breaks away completely.

    Grettings from Berlin/Germany

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