news feeds

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 01:12:56PM +0000, dom wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:26:49PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> > Thirdly, Feedvalidator also says (perhaps spuriously) that the HTTP
> > header should have the character encoding in it. There appears to be no
> > way to turn this off in CGI.pm. Again, suggestions welcome although I'm 
> > not too worried about this one.
> 
> The way to fix this is to serve the RSS feed with a type of
> 'application/rss+xml' type ('application/atom+xml' for Atom).  CGI.pm
> will only set the charset if the media type is text/*.

One more thing...  For feeds, it's generally a better idea to write to a
file and then just let Apache serve the file.  This is because Apache
knows how to do stuff like If-Modified-Since, ETags, gzip encoding and
the rest, which can bring large bandwidth savings.  Otherwise you have
to implement it all yourself, which is boring and wasteful.

-Dom