Throttle your RSS
Lately I’ve been messing with feeds, feeds and more feeds. Doing so has led me to thinking somewhat differently about how feeds are created, distributed and used. I’ll have gobs of goodies to write up on this topic on the 9rules network blog, but for now I have a request to make of all blog authors that choose to use RSS (or Atom).
Yesterday was a terribly busy day for me. I had tons of work to get done, and X-cart was giving me some major issues for reasons still not known. That being said I was unable to open NetNewsWire at all yesterday to read my “dailies”. Opening NNW today I was greeted with roughly 550 unread items to peruse. Upon further examination I figured out that, even with 550 new items to read, I missed out on a few posts. How can this be?
Most blog authors have their RSS items set to feed 10 or 20 of the latest posts on their blog. If, though, you post more than 10 or 20 articles to your Weblog in between the time I have to open my feed reader of choice, I’m up-the-creek. In other words I will miss those posts which are no longer available in the feed.
How can we correct this issue? Providing an RSS feed of all of your posts would do the trick, but that just isn’t feasible. Technically there is no way for you, as a blog author, to know how often your readers will check your feed for new items. However, you can make a pretty good guess at how best to serve your readers by knowing how many posts you typically post to your blog. On TUG.n, we try to post at least a few times a week, so having our RSS feed show the last 10 post would keep you up-to-date for at least 5 weeks worth of posts. So you will now need to decide how big of a time span you will offer your readers between updates. Almost all CMSs (WordPress, Moveabletype, Typepad) give you the ability to change this in your preferences/options somewhere.
So “throttle your RSS” feed according to the frequency of your posts. This will allow busy people like me to keep up-to-date with everything you write. Thanks in advance.
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One of the reason why I stay with bloglines - they fetch ones an hour.
And also the reason why I try not to post more than ~7 entries at one day - so people can catch up.
Nicole Simon on April 27th, 2005 3:53 pm
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Nicole: Thanks for the comment. But there is no reason that you should be limited to the number of posts that you write. I agree Bloglines is a good solution for some - but making some small adjustments to how you serve RSS to your readers can be beneficial to the audience and to the author.
Colin D. Devroe on April 28th, 2005 9:33 am
Not many of my postings are time critical. So there would be much more fun for my reader to have 2 posting for 7 days instead of 14 posting one day and nothing for the rest of the week
Nicole Simon on April 28th, 2005 3:53 pm