My favorite RSS aggregator is AmphetaDesk, its available for a whole range of platforms (including easy installs for Windows, Mac OS 7-9, Mac OS X etc). Its a really nice piece of software, but in making it they implemented the requests for RSS feeds wrong.
Instead of letting the users of Amphetadesk include themselves in the User Agent (which IMHO would be the right way to do it), they ask their users to include a URL that is sent with the request as a referer! Which, IMNSHO is wrong!
If you feel like fixing the problem, I have a quick fix for you. Hopefully they will fix it in future versions after the 0.93 which is the current version of Amphetadesk when writing this.
[Update: It has been fixed in the CVS repository for the AmphetaDesk project, and the issue will be fixed in future versions. But at the moment there are no way of easily personalizing the Agent string without the fix I suggest here.]
[Update 6th of June 2003: I have changed the fix a little, it appears you have to remove one more line of code to get rid of the referer in Amphetadesk. Please also be aware that this fix is spesific to AmphetaDesk v. 0.93.1]
To fix this error, do the following:
Locate the WWW.pm module located in \lib\AmphetaDesk under your AmphetaDesk catalog.
IMPORTANT: Make a copy of WWW.pm for safe keeping, in case you should ruin it while editing.
Here is the modifications you need to make in WWW.pm:
On line 63 exchange “app_url” for “user_http_referer”
On line 106 AND 174 – Comment out the line:
$req->referer( get_setting(“user_http_referer”) );
So you are left with
#$req->referer( get_setting(“user_http_referer”) );
That is it, save and you will be requesting RSS feed with RFC compliant HTTP requests.
BTW: If you want to add your URL to the UserAgent string of AmphetaDesk after this, all you need to do is to go to my_settings.html and type in your url in the “Would You Like Servers To Know Who’s Reading” form field.