Martin Geisler Online

I would like to say a big “Thank You!” to those of you who still read my page the regular way — you know… with a webbrowser pointed to http://mgeisler.net/ and not by the planet or some other cheating way where you don’t see the advertisements…

You’ve clicked 664 times on the Google AdSense adds I’ve put on my pages, and thus earned me $100! I started in June 2005 with AdSense, so this is a little more than $14 a month — a nice little extra income. I would of course be happy to hear about experiences from others.

I haven’t seen the money yet, but it will be put in my bank account at the end of this month, and I believe I’ll be smiling on my way to the bank! :-)

Before I created the planet (what a funny thing to write :-) I never looked at my RSS feeds, but now they’ve suddenly become very important. And they’re wrong! Or rather, the Etag and Last-Modified headers sent out are false, and so browser and feed aggregators wont be updated as they should.

Take a look at this trace caught with the excellent Live HTTP Headers plugin for Firefox — I’ve removed most of the other headers except for the Etag and Last-Modified headers. First I request Rune’s RSS feed for comments using Shift-”reload” to make Firefox bypass its own cache:

GET /?feed=comments-rss2 HTTP/1.1
Host: kirkebrand.dk
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 21:12:50 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:14:20 GMT
Etag: "0dfff2fe5ab59c79c6105ac336b388ed"
Status: 200 OK

Bravo! We get the feed back.

I then posted a comment, which should update the feed. Reloading in Firefox looks like this where it does a conditional HTTP request by sending the Etag and Last-Modified headers along:

GET /?feed=comments-rss2 HTTP/1.1
Host: kirkebrand.dk
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:14:20 GMT
If-None-Match: "0dfff2fe5ab59c79c6105ac336b388ed"
Cache-Control: max-age=0
HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 21:13:54 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:14:20 GMT
Etag: "0dfff2fe5ab59c79c6105ac336b388ed"
Status: 304 Not Modified

Hmm… that shouldn’t have been a 304 Not Modified, but a 200 OK with a new Last-Modified header and a new Etag! The funny thing is that when I press Shift and reload the page I and get the updated feed, but the headers still look like this:

http://kirkebrand.dk/?feed=comments-rss2
GET /?feed=comments-rss2 HTTP/1.1
Host: kirkebrand.dk
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 21:14:08 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:14:20 GMT
Etag: "0dfff2fe5ab59c79c6105ac336b388ed"
Status: 200 OK

So something is definitely wrong here! I would be happy if some of you could try out the procedure above yourself and report your findings. I’ve seen this problem on my own blog and on Lars’ blog too, so the problem seems to affect version 1.5.2 as well as the new 2.0.

If you search for “DAIMI” in Google, then you’ll find our nice little DAIMI Planet listed as result number seven. I think that’s pretty cool to become number seven out of 1,780,000 :-) And Google has been pretty fast too — the planet has only been 11 days online.

I’ve updated the planet so that it grabs the comment feeds and attaches the comments to the appropriate posts. Right now it uses all the comments it can get hold of — the number should perhaps be limited. Or posts with new comments should be pulled to the top? This could be sorted with JavaScript, but I don’t want to mess with it right now. Feel free to beat me to it :-)

I’ve also digged deep in my image archive and found some images of Lars, Mikkel, and Janus. If you guys have any better images then just send them to me. I’ve tried to correct the colors a bit, so if you have any complaints just let me know.

I’m 24 years old today, so in a hexadecimal world, I would now be old enough (0x18 years) to get a drivers license and to get in at the fancy discoteques… in this world I guess it just means that I’m a little older than last year :-)

Stéphanie and I are down in Wallis and today we’ll go to Italy with her parents to have real italian pizza for dinner — you can do such crazy things here in Switzerland! Actually it’s just half an hour with train from Brig, Switzerland to Domodossola, Italy. I think it’s going to be cool!

In other news today: I’m updating the planet soon so that the comments will be displayed too. Maybe I’ll even do some nice JavaScript trickery so that you can show/hide the comments yourself… The generation of the page is almost trivial using the amazing, universal feedparser for [Python][]. But you’ll still have to wait a bit for it…