FEED 2 : Thoughts on RSS and Feeds
How many RSS feeds are you watching ? Yesterday I cleaned my feed list, and removed about 50 feeds that looks no more interesting for me, but still watching about 100 feeds ! I didn't notice that they are so much !
Doing some calculation, my software update automaticly my feeds every 30min, so I've written a small code that measure all feeds that I'm watching in different times and fount about 2Mo ( 1.7Mo after cleaning feeds ). So everyday there I have about 100Mo of bandwidth used just for RSS ! Amazing
But I still have a preference to use rss reader software rather than online rss readers, so even when I'm offline I can have something to read. But the problem is that it's updating RSS even if there is no update in any blogs.
A fast solution : I have make it doing updates every hour, so the daily 100Mo becomes 50Mo only. But it still not enough.
RSS Changes
If I wanted to check for RSS changes before doing an update I'll face two problems, the first one is Last-Modified informations that the server return is relative to the file and not to the content ! And the second problem that the changes I want to do will be on the RSS and feeds standard in general. So if we call RSS,Atom,RDF and other syndication standard by feed 1, I'll need something called feed 2
FEED version 2
Additional to the standard described by W3C or other standard organisations which describe the content, we'll need to add an additional information on header for dynamicly generated files. So i'll have two cases
- XML files saved on server. Similar to what blogger do, it generate an atom.xml file, you may check for headers for possible update before loading the entire file
- XML files generated by script. Like an rss.php script which generate dynamicly your RSS and in this case it's possible to use the Content-MD5 header. The script will calculate and send the MD5 in HTTP headers before sending content. If the MD5 changed you can get the RSS otherwise stop the connection.
Content-MD5
The Content-MD5 entity-header field, as defined in RFC 1864 [23], is an MD5 digest of the entity-body for the purpose of providing an end-to-end message integrity check (MIC) of the entity-body.
Content-MD5 = "Content-MD5" ":" md5-digest
md5-digest =
Conclusion
Without making any changes in the basics of current syndications standard, feed 2 could be a solution to optimize bandwidth usage for websites and news readers.
