Finer points of serving feeds
Kevin Railsback: As InfoWorld's CTO, Chad Dickerson, posted here, InfoWorld has been noticing a lot of congestion at the top of the hour when thousands of RSS clients all hit our servers simultaneously to check for updated feeds. We've done a number of things to alleviate this
Excellent! Kevin, since you have popped the hood anyway, here are a few things to consider:
- redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302. Infoworld is currently redirecting from news.rdf to news.xml with a HTTP 302 which is a temporary redirect. Consumers will follow the redirect, but will continue to issue requests against the original URL, resulting in double the number of requests.
- supporting either gzip or deflate encoding
- Adding a encoding declaration in the XML prolog or http headers. Omitting this information is typically is an indication that encoding issues haven't been thought through. Infoworld feeds will likely will have problems with «Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn» and with characters like «‘’“”–—».
- Using a content-type of application/xml instead of text/xml. This is related to the encoding/charset discussion above.
The feedvalidator doesn't currently provide this level of feedback as it was thought that providing too much information would cause people to see the issues reported as non-problems (all of items mentioned above are legal, at least until the first non-ASCII character is encountered) and ignore more important issues.
Perhaps the feedvalidator should have a separate interface, or perhaps even a checkbox, which would enable this level of information to be included.
Either a checkbox, or a warning with a link to this kind of information.
It'll help developers of blog systems too.
Posted by Michael Koziarski atAnd they are... redirecting using HTTP 301, using either gzip or deflate encoding, adding a encoding declaration in the XML prolog or http headers, and using a content-type of application/xml instead of text/xml....
Excerpt from Archipelago at
Sam Ruby: Finer points of serving feeds
redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302, supporting either gzip or deflate encoding, adding an encoding declaration, content type application/xml......Excerpt from Dave Walker's Bookmarks at
More on InfoWorld's RSS/Apache optimization
More excellent suggestions from Sam Ruby: Finer points of serving feeds redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302. Infoworld is currently redirecting from news.rdf to news.xml with a HTTP 302 which is a temporary redirect. Consumers will...Excerpt from Kevin Railsback at
Why would you provide an XML button on your page and have the link on that button respond HTTP 301? If it's permanently moved, then you should provide the new link in the first place. He should have asked why 2 cycles? There might be a valid reason, although from what I can tell, not much thought was put into the coding of the site.
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Philippe Janvier : Finer points of serving feeds - "Perhaps the feedvalidator should have a separate interface, or perhaps even a checkbox, which would enable this level of information to be included." Oh oui!...
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More on InfoWorld's RSS/Apache optimization
More excellent suggestions from Sam Ruby: Finer points of serving feeds redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302. Infoworld is currently redirecting from news.rdf to news.xml with a HTTP 302 which is a temporary redirect. Consumers will...Excerpt from Kevin Railsback at
More on InfoWorld's RSS/Apache optimization
More excellent suggestions from Sam Ruby: Finer points of serving feeds redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302. Infoworld is currently redirecting from news.rdf to news.xml with a HTTP 302 which is a temporary redirect. Consumers will...Excerpt from Kevin Railsback at
"Perhaps the feedvalidator should have a separate interface, or perhaps even a checkbox, which would enable this level of information to be included."
+1
Posted by Anonymoose at