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.
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.
"Perhaps the feedvalidator should have a separate interface, or perhaps even a checkbox, which would enable this level of information to be included."
And 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....
redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302, supporting either gzip or deflate encoding, adding an encoding declaration, content type application/xml......
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...
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.
The 0.3 release of the Rome Syndication Library marks the first release of the Rome Fetcher. This library provides a simple but useful implementation of a HTTP fetcher for RSS/Atom feeds. It supports HTTP conditional gets (ie: last modified and...
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!...
W/ all the recent misleading blog entries on RSS scaling, I thought I'd spend a few moments enumerating the techniques that can be used to better scale your RSS feed. Conditional GET TTL SkipHours and SkipDays Syndication Hints I'll further post...
Jeremy Zawodny: If you had ideas about the previously noted RSS Scaling Problem and are at OSCON now, stop by Douglas Fir to chat about it. Here's the session blurb: With RSS usage growing like mad, does having every client pull their own copy still...
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...
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...