Big WordPress Omission

It seems from my early work that there is one huge omission in the out-of-the-box WordPress install. It doesn’t do the Last-Modified header, on either the web pages or the RSS. I’m of the opinion that everything that emits or reads an RSS feed MUST use or honor this header. When you have a few thousand people subscribed to your feed, why not make it as simple as possible for those ones that check more frequently to know when not to download that 50K? That was one of my first additions to get_enclosures beyond the basic – storing a cache of when the last fetch of a feed was received and setting the If-Modified-Since header of the HTTP connection. This crap exists in the protocol, so why not use it?

I don’t know if there is a plugin that does this, but I know that if not that’s one of my first orders of business – to write one.

Update: Now I see. The themes I’m using are all using https://evilgeniuschronicles.org/?feed=rss2 as the link to the RSS feed, but if I use https://evilgeniuschronicles.org/wp-rss2.php then you do get the header set correctly. False alarm, citizens. Sorry about that.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “Big WordPress Omission”

  1. you know dave, watching you tweak w/ this new blogging toolkit is like watching stop action animation during the editing process – only much slower 😉

    keep going – you’ll get there, and i’ll bet you’re having fun messin w/ it…

  2. Dave – you might find enabling mod_rewrite (Permalinks) useful – assuming your web host supports it.

    It means URL’s are formatted with a bit more sense, such as:

    /wordpress/feed
    /wordpress/feed/atom
    /wordpress/feed/rss2

    .. and so on. Makes it easy to quote the various feeds with a slightly more semantic (not to mention logical) naming convention.

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