Re: [syndication] RSS Clients

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net>]

5/17/01 10:44:27 AM, Brian Aker <brian@tangent.org> wrote:

>Morbus Iff wrote:
>>   - I'm the webmaster. Slashdot suddenly includes my RSS
>>     in their default page. Millions of downloads off my
>>     site. My hit return value is maybe 2% (since there's
>>     so many damn stories on /. now that people don't have
>>     time to click on other people's stories).
>Which is why slashdot only grabs rss files once an hour
>from sites. Somewhere in my todo list is to fix it
>so that we only grab data per the period specified in
>the rss file itself.

The problem that got this discussion started was that people were talking about using browser-side 
scripting to include one site's RSS feed on another site, which necessarily means that each time a 
user loaded the other site, their browser, under scripted control, would hit the first site's feed.  
If you're doing everything on the client side, there's no way to "factor out" the retrieval of the 
feed the way you're doing.  You grab the feed once an hour and integrate its results into the content 
you deliver to your users; that's the "factoring"; it doesn't matter how many people hit Slashdot, 
the RSS feed still gets hit once an hour.  But if everyone who hit Slashdot also had to hit the RSS 
feed, the site with the feed would be getting hit hard.  The problem wouldn't so much be bandwidth; 
RSS files are usually short; it would be the sheer number of HTTP connections.