The RSS Blog

Nathan Wallace: Initially I was angry at how cleverly Dare Obasanjo (an RSS Bandit developer) had twisted a source quote and implied that Sauce Reader's comments RSS support was causing 10,000+ hits on servers and generally behaving as a bad net citizen. I then became amused when I discovered that a "peacemaker" had picked up on this and immediately elevated Sauce Reader to evil status. The blogosphere at work...

Randy: Nathan doesn't like that I bundled his software into the Evil Software bin.

Nathan: By default, Sauce Reader will automatically check comment RSS feeds for new comments for the first 7 days after the weblog post is published.

Randy: I like the seven day throttling, that's a great feature, but what happens to comments left more than 7 days after the Weblog post is published? I would suggest reducing the throttling based on the pubDate or lastBuildDate of the comment feed.

For example, Juice, my personal browser, has built-in RSS support. If a feed hasn't been modified for a week, then I reduce polling by six-fold. A month is twelve-fold. Three months, twenty-four fold.

But that's not where Nathan is erring. Where he is erring is on polling feeds hourly that were not specifically subscribed to by the end-user. In Juice, any feed that is not specifically subscribed to, is throttled back six-fold. In other words, I'll poll it every six hours for the first week, then every day and a half and so-on, till I'm polling the feed as little as once or twice per week. And, I provide a more specific mechanism to subscribe to a comments feed. This gives the option back to the end-user to poll the hell-out-of Dare's server :)

Juice is not evil.

P.S. Subscribed.

Update: Just notice the following on a followup read.

Nathan: Sauce Reader is among the market leaders in terms of general client behaviour: 1. The default feed refresh frequency is 4 hours.

Randy: This information means that Sauce Readers polls 1/4 as often as other readers. I wonder why? Also, this invalidated my "pollijng feeds hourly that were not specifically subscribed to by the end-user" comment. Must apologize for that. Sorry Nathan.