RSS Politeness
Bill Kearney warns that he’s going to be posting some public criticism of RSS readers that don’t meet his standards for "politeness". He thinks feeds shouldn’t be fetched more than once every few hours (or days), and that there should be support for feed-indicated scheduling and compression, among other things.
I’m afraid Hep would get a big fat F on his test at the moment, but I’ll certainly add some of these things to my TODO list. On the plus side, Wari just contributed a patch to make Hep’s ETag support work with more servers than it had before. So we’re improving.
The one thing I don’t agree with is Bill’s statement that "most [feeds] could do with being polled every few days instead of every few hours." To me, one of the big advantages of using RSS is that I get to read news soon after it’s posted. Before I started using Hep I’d check some sites several times a day to see if there was any new news, and those visits use a lot more bandwidth than grabbing an RSS feed.
