This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: How not to run a service Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I noticed this morning that MS is longer providing full content in their RSS feeds, and I commented on that here. Since then, I was told that the MSDN site supports both mod-gzip and conditional-get - and that they still had bandwidth issues. I was skeptical, to say the least. So, I fired up a VW image and tried the following:

HttpClientModel get: 'http://blogs.msdn.com/MainFeed.aspx'.

I stepped through the request in a debugger, so that I could see exactly what happened. Sure enough, the request asked for compressed content - but did not receive it. I got back a textual response with the feed's contents. As I stepped through, my code cached the necessary information for a future request (i.e., the requisite information for conditional-get). Then I immediately executed the same request. Still not compressed content, but another surprise - the exact same response (i.e., same content) - not a 304. So, color me unimpressed. The problem isn't with RSS, and we don't need some snazzy updated version of nntp. What we need is for someone to provide a cluestick to the people behind msdn blog feeds. To see a large number of people who are unclear on the concept, read the comment stream from Scoble's post