etags support

As I mentioned in my weblog 
(http://randomthoughts.vandorp.ca/WK/blog/844_RSS_melts_the_web.item)
i've got etag support working for syncato. It's a simple patch to the code.

Basically all i'm doing now is an md5.hexdigest of the result before 
it's being sent back to the client and using
the digest as the etag.

Some outstanding issues remain mostly with respect to site design, and 
how one would wish for support
to work on their site.

1) In order for the way i implemented etag support the rss20 feed needs 
to be edited to remove dc:date in the main
channel portion of the feed. This is due to the fact that it displays 
the current date. (at least when it's live and not cached)

2) templates currently include recent entries and recent comments for 
all posts. There maybe value in only displaying the dynamically
updated material on the main page. i.e. whenever the site updates at all 
the etags for posts that are old would still get updated and
cause them to be reloaded. This doesnt' really matter for syndication 
feeds, but currently google hammers my site and reloads all
content everytime it spiders. My guess is, if etags were implemented 
properly it would use conditional get when spidering.

3) I'm totally clueless as to whether supporting conditional gets 
through etags is good enough or if one should come up with a strategy
for last-modifed headers as well.

Any comments?

-darryl

-- 
http://randomthoughts.vandorp.ca/WK/blog



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