Sorry to chuck this here, but I’m on my way off to meet up with some folks and don’t have time to search out if this is a known issue or not. It looks like the conditional get support in Wordpress 1.5.1 might be broken for some combinations of requests and maybe PHP versions. There’s this check in wp-blog-header.php:

if ( ($client_last_modified && $client_etag) ? ((strtotime($client_last_modified) >= strtotime($wp_last_modified)) && ($client_etag == $wp_etag)) : ((strtotime($client_last_modified) >= strtotime($wp_last_modified)) || ($client_etag == $wp_etag)) )

The problem is when there’s no last modified header at all, so $client_last_modified is false, and we evaluate the second alternate of that conditional. For all the versions of PHP I’ve tried the strtotime() function treats false the same as “now” and returns the current time. Thus strtotime( false ) is always greater than the $wp_last_modified time. And I get odd responses like this:

hole:~ miker$ more feedreq.raw GET /blog/?feed=atom HTTP/1.0 Host: www.thisismobility.com hole:~ miker$ cat feedreq.raw | nc www.thisismobility.com 80 HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 01:59:52 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.19 OpenSSL/0.9.6c ETag: “2d0a68b8eeadb53e4597a041c96a83c8” X-Pingback: http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/xmlrpc.php X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10 Last-Modified: Fri, 13 May 2005 12:32:30 GMT Connection: close Content-Type: text/html

hole:~ miker$

No state headers at all and a 304 return? No wonder people were telling me they were having trouble with the This is Mobility feed. Anyone else seeing that, or did I mess something up and not notice? I thought I had a clean 1.5.1 install, but I’ve been known to flail and then forget about it.