Rachel Kroll
A short note to my feed reader score project participants: I screwed up something fierce the other day. I set some bad dates for the Last-Modified header. It's all done in code, and it's not based on an actual file, so it's possible to set *nearly* any value in there.
It started when I either fat-fingered or stupid-houred this date the other day:
Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:04:45 GMT
That was in the GET handler for the test feed for about a day. Then, when I "fixed" it, I set it to something a few days in the future:
Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:04:45 GMT
It was only June 16th when I did that. Oops.
Anyway, this started showing up as all kinds of crazy If-Modified-Since values being presented by clients, and I thought those clients were taking the value from my end and were "clamping" it to the current time. Instead, nope, it was all on my side.
Would you believe that Apache httpd will do that all by itself? Yep. If you have a CGI program which emits a Last-Modified header in the future, it'll totally squish it down to the current date/time instead.
Further complicating the matter is that I logged the values that I *thought* were being served up, and then used them to run comparisons and generate warnings when they didn't match.
My sincere apologies to anyone who spent the last couple of days chasing after a problem that was totally created by me on this end.
Now I get to figure out how to clean up my mess. Fun!