RSS images

[Matt Hamilton]

Something I just noticed this morning: The “via-feed” images embedded in the bottom of posts when viewing my blog’s feed are broken – IE’s feed-reading view shows the red “X”. Should that be serving up a 1x1 transparent gif or something? Presumably it’s for analytics to track post access via feeds.

[Aaron Powell]

Yeah it should be doing a 1x1 px transparent gif, but my preference would be to put the image element as display:none so it doesn't show at all.

Or we can remove it as it doesn't do anything unless you're reading your IIS logs :P
Aaron Powell
Umbraco Ninja

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

I’m not sure if CSS display: none would apply to the feed reading view in IE, but we can give it a try. I’ll have to check the relevant controller action (/post-name/via-feed) to see what it’s doing, because it’s definitely not serving up an image at the moment.

[Matt Hamilton]

Ok, it works fine from Paul’s site, so it’s possible that I don’t actually have the image in question on matthamilton.net. I’ll check that from home some time. For reference, the route in question is line 84 in RoutesModule.cs:

 

routes.MapRoute(R(), "{page}/via-feed", new { controller = "Resource", action = "Render", fileName = "/Views/Shared/Images/Transparent.gif", contentType = "image/gif" });

 

From: Aaron Powell

Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2010 11:54 AM

To: funnel...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: RSS images

 

[Aaron Powell]

Maybe you're just missing the image on your server?

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Ninja

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Yeah I just checked, and it’s there. Very strange. Will have to debug at home I guess. The URLs work fine on your site and on Paul’s.

[Aaron Powell]

I thought I'd have a look for you so I spun up Charles and hit your feed and the response shows that the items return correctly, the 'via-feed' images return with a HTTP Status 200 and if you go to the image directly it's fine.

And this is exactly what happens with Paul's site (which worked fine), so I'm very confused :/

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Ninja

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Uh ... wha-?

 

If I visit this URL in IE: http://www.matthamilton.net/halfwit-loses-dynamic-columns/via-feed

 

... I get the “broken image” red-x picture. You don’t see that? What URL are you looking at on my site?

[Matt Hamilton]

Holy crap, you’re right – in Chrome it works fine. WTF?

[Aaron Powell]

I'd say it's something to do with IEs support for 1pixel images, it returns a 200 status just fine on that URL, but shows a broken image in the browser...

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Ninja

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Ok that’s really interesting. Especially since IE displays no red x when I visit a “via-feed” URL on paulstovell.com or aaron-powell.com.

[Aaron Powell]

You're doing it wrong :P

But seriously, I'm stumped, there is nothing I can see on the response between a request to my site and a request to your site...

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Ninja

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Sigh. I’ll make sure I’ve got the latest FW deployed to matthamilton.net anyway, just in case. I can browse to http://matthamilton.net/Views/Shared/Image/Transparent.gif  here and it works fine – no broken image. Very strange indeed.

[Matt Hamilton]

Interesting. If I visit this URL in Firefox:

 

http://matthamilton.net/halfwit-loses-dynamic-columns/via-feed

 

It shows me the URL rather than a gif image. It’s like it’s serving up the URL string as the result, but with a MIME type of image/gif. Chrome is just doing its best and displaying nothing, but IE sees that it’s not a valid GIF and shows a broken image. Firefox is simply showing me the raw bytes that came down.

[Matt Hamilton]

Interesting! Same problem occurs with /favicon.png. The actual file is there – visiting it via /Views/Shared/Resources/favicon.png works fine. Gotta be some quirk with the ResourceController and the way it’s serving up images.

[Matt Hamilton]

Ok, here's some follow-up info about my broken-images issue.

I jumped into fiddler and traced the download of /post-name/via-feed vs
/views/shared/images/transparent.gif. The two downloads give different
results!

Here are the headers from the "via-feed" one:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: image/gif
Expires: Mon, 07 Feb 2011 05:33:59 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:33:59 GMT
Content-Length: 52

... and from the direct-to-the-gif one:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/gif
Last-Modified: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:54:59 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "7c2d21f57642cb1:0"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:30:54 GMT
Content-Length: 42

As you can see, the gif returned by the /post-name/via-feed URL is 10 bytes
larger than the one returned by visiting the file directly! Something is
screwy with the routed version.

I will redeploy everything at some point and see if it fixes it. Very odd.

Matt

[Matt Hamilton]

Ok – I have redeployed and everything looks good now. I reckon I was still running an outdated version of FunnelWeb. What a relief!

[Paul Stovell]

I think I got those problems before I updated - it was caused by client dependency. The image file was 200 OK but the contents were corrupted. Since it's a 1x1 image you wouldn't be able to tell if its corrupted in the other browsers. 

Paul

[Aaron Powell]

But that was all images so Matt should have noticed well before

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Ninja

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com