Copia housecleaning

I've finally had some time today, as I prepare for the holidays, to fix some things on Copia that have been broken for too long. Some of the highlights, especially concerning issues mentioned by readers (thanks, guys), are:

RSS 1.0 feed body fix. Added rss:description field for the RSS 1.0 feed, which fixes missing post bodies in readers such as Bloglines which don't support support content:encoded. I do truncate the field to 500 characters, according to the recommendation in the spec.

Single entry view title fix. Added entry titles for single entry pages. Before today, if you viewed this entry through the perma-link, the title would just say "Copia"; now it says "Copia ✏Copia housecleaning"). I've wanted to do this for a while, but I was having the devil of a time figuring out how to do it with PyBlosxom. A scolding from Dan Connolly forced me to chase down a fix. For other PyBlosxom users the trick is to use the comments plug-in, copy the head.* flavor file to comment-head.*, and then update to use the $title variable, which is the title of the entry itself ($blog-title is the title of the entire blog). In my case the updated HTML header template looks like:

<title>$blog_title &#x270F;$title</title>

I did get a report that Copia is incorrectly sending `Content-Type header text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1`, but when I check using the LiveHTTPHeaders extension for FireFox on Linux it reports the correct charset=UTF-8 from the server. If anyone else can corroborate this issue, please leave a comment with the specific URL from which you noticed the error, your platform and browser, and the HTTP sniffing tool were you using. Thanks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia

3 responses

Another suggestion for a futher titular improvement: put the site name after the title, not in front. That way, with a large number bunch of tabs open, the title will still be out front; a bunch of bookmarks on Copia will be selectable by the first letter(s) of the title; you will get more search engine juice, since they weigh the front of the title higher; etc.

— Aristotle Pagaltzis

Uche, I was the one who reported the iso-8859-1 encoding issue. Funny, here at home the browser is correctly seeing utf-8 in the header. I'm using Firefox 1.0.7 on Win2000 SP4 both here and at work, where I get the problem. But at work, the browser doesn't see utf-8, here it does. Odd.

I did notice that the accept encoding header here at home does say 8859-1 or utf-8. At work IIRC (and I better check tomorrow), it only says 8859-1. Maybe that's the difference.

— Tom Passin

Good morning, Uche. I've just tested the headers at work, and I am receiving an iso-8859-1 encoding header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 16:00:37 GMT

Server: Apache/2.0.50 (Linux/SUSE)

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

I captured the headers from your server using wget. My browser does say it will accept either 8859-1 or utf-8 (I look at the headers using the TamperData extension for Firefox):

Accept-Charset=ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

So I am getting different results depending on whether I'm browsing from home or from work, even though both use the same version of Firefox and Windows 2000.

Wonder if the firewall at work could have anything to do with it. Seems awfully unlikely, doesn't it?