rails send_data fails on IE when SSL enabled

Came across a nasty issue using rails send_data with IE. Everything worked fine until the pages were running under SSL / HTTPS. Turns out the issue is with file download over SSL when the Cache-Control and Pragma html headers are set to no-cache.

The error message from IE

Internet Explorer was unable to open this site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

The fix...

# before calling send_data
response.headers.delete("Pragma")
response.headers.delete('Cache-Control')

This issue is not restricted to rails, any server side code that sets no-cache is subject to the same issue. Glad I was able to find this post.

see also kb-316431

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap.xml issues

After uploading my sitemap.xml file to Google Webmaster Tools I received the following error message and no additional error details were included:

Error: The last attempt at downloading the Sitemap failed. The details below are representative of the last successful download.

I searched around a bit and found a forum post where someone said they get this error 'sometimes', but after switching to use a gzip formatted sitemap.xml file the error went away

on ubuntu

gzip ./sitemap.xml

compresses the file to ./sitemap.xml.gz and deletes the sitemap.xml file by default

after uploading Google was able to process without issue