Thursday, September 25, 2003

CGI module upgrade breaks Blosxom in IE 6

Blosxom Test Notes: I thought I was going crazy. I had been working happily with Blosxom for several weeks and came in Wednesday morning and all of a sudden, when I tried to view my weblog in Internet Explorer 6, my browser was prompting me as if it considered the file a downloadable Mime type. The day before I had asked the system personnel to upgrade the File::Spec module to the latest version so the recententries plugin would work. I called them back and asked them if they had done anything to the overall server settings that would cause this behavior. Everyone seemed baffled, especially since the Weblog still loaded properly in Mozilla, Netscape, Opera and older versions of IE. I even went to the trouble of uninstalling all the plugins, downloading a fresh copy of Blosxom and reconfiguring and resetting the file permissions but nothing changed. This afternoon, one of the Perl technicians called me back and together we reviewed the content-type settings produced by the Blosxom script. He noticed that the script was outputting an extra space before the ending semi-colon in the Content_type statement. So he changed line 262 of the Blosxom cgi file thus:

Was: $content_type =~ s!\n.*!!s;

Needs to be: $content_type =~ s!\s*\n\s*.*!!s;

Now it once more works with IE 6. He suspects that when the systems people updated the cgi modules, one of new modules must have been less forgiving than the older version. I thought I would share our experience with you in case it might help others.

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