blogger not processing openID delegation

It was pleasant to discover that blogger.com (now part of the Google conglomerate) started supporting OpenID comment authentication last year.

However, at some point in the last couple of months it stopped working for me; I get the error code bX-m9h15s when trying to authenticate. As far as I know, my OpenID server is working just fine (OpenID Checkup agrees).

If I use my server URL directly (instead of an HTML resource that uses delegation) it works, albeit without incorporating any of the Simple Registration data. There are plenty of other reports, but nobody competent (and/or employed by google) has responded.

There doesn’t seem to be a true bug reporting facility for blogger; the competent users help the incompetent users on the discussion forum, but I can’t see any developer or even QC presence there.

Apache 304 and mod_deflate revisited

Last year I commented on how mod_deflate breaks the cache validation model. Essentially the problem has been addressing two issues:

So in January 2008, a change was committed to fix #39727, which introduced #45023. Now in April this year, it was reversed to fix #45023. I agree with the priorities here; no caching is much worse for web performance.

As Roy Fielding pointed out the correct way to deal with this issue is to stop abusing Content-Encoding for performance-compression and start using Transfer-Encoding; pity browsers and HTTP servers haven’t got there yet.