After my rant about bandwidth saving
from last night, I decided to do what I could with my install of PyBlosxom. Unfortunately, it’s going to be
difficult to implement the if-modified-since directive with how PyBloxsom is built,
however, I knew it couldn’t be that hard to work around the Gzip stuff. Basically, all the encodings a client
can accept are stored in an environment variable HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING. This will
contain a string something like gzip,deflate. What I do is break apart the string,
and if gzip is found in the string, I encode the data.
Of course, it wasn’t quite that straight forward. Luckily, I already was using a
customized PyBlosxom renderer, which made this a little
easier. This renderer now handles all the gzip stuff. If a client support gzip, then the output stream is
automatically changed to sys.stdout and the data is sent out that way to avoid
nasty encoding problems. Also, I needed to add a content-length to the output
so everything would come across nice and neat for the clients unpacking the data. The result is pretty nice.
Incidentally, this is needed because by I couldn’t figure out how to get Apache’s mod-gzip to compress output of CGI scripts. Once again, whenver I get around to completing
all the work on PriBlog, I don’t think this will be much of a problem because most
of the content will be statically generated.
