Reading Wordpress RSS in .NET aggregators

While we’re waiting for the Wordpress typo to be fixed (they don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and the system’s users won’t update anyway), you can hack your RSS aggregator so it ignores the .NET security update and accepts to read Wordpress RSS feeds.

If you’re using SauceReader, you should open the saucereadergui.exe.config and add the following block at the end, just before the </configuration> line:

<system.net>
<settings>
<httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing="true" />
</settings>
</system.net>

If you’re using another .NET aggregator, the complete operation is detailed there.

A call to all Wordpress users

For a while now my RSS aggregator wasn’t reading Wordpress feeds anymore, and I didn’t understand why (not that I tried to, either).

Today I got tired of it, installed Wordpress on my server, and found what was wrong: a typo. Wordpress sends a misnamed header, and the .NET runtime (upon which 90% of RSS aggregators rely on PC) has become very picky with the latest security updates, and it just plain rejects the file.

So, if you have Wordpress, and you want to be read (at least by me), you must edit the wp-blog-header.php file, replacing “Last Modified:” with “Last-Modified:” (ie, inserting an hyphen) on line 87.

And that’s all.

I have trouble understanding why a security patch would need to reject any erroneous header rather than just ignore it, but… well, I also have trouble understanding how one could work for Microsoft, so the whole thing’s just obviously beyond my comprehension.