bedeviled mojo slop

I hate NetNewsWire because it does have the bandwidth statistics window which tells you the following after starting it up: 1) how many checks you've done per feed, 2) 200s returned (entire RSS feed downloaded - less is better), 3) 304s returned (# of times server returned Not Modified - more is better), 4) GZip'd content (# of times server returned compressed content - more is better), 5) Content bytes (total # of bytes downloaded), and 6) Average bytes. I love NetNewsWire because of the following: 1) It's a kick-ass RSS reader for OS X and 2) It's helped me help blojsom to become a more bandwidth friendly blog software package. Why? GZIP compression filter and the added-as-of-yesterday Conditional GET plugin (it'll be available in the 2.08 release but is running live on this blog).

Please, if you're not using a smart GZIP filter (one that sends GZIP'd content only if the requestor can "understand" GZIP) and some component which handles Conditional GET in your blog software, you're cheating yourself. If your blog software and/or ISP doesn't do GZIP or Conditional GET, ask for it. It's worth it or you're cheating yourself ... cheating yourself right out of those precious bits that hosting companies monitor. Bandwidth is cheap, yes, but it's not free.

So, I'm happily looking at the NetNewsWire statistic window for my blog and until this post goes live, my blog is at 5 checks, 0 200s, 5 304s, and 0 GZIPs (but when the post goes live it'll be GZIP'd). Is your blog software doing the right thing?

References:
GZIP filter code.
HTTP Conditional GET for RSS hackers.