Truncated RSS Feeds: A Suggestion
Posted by shughes Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:23:33 GMT
So, a few days ago I complained about sites who hosted RSS feeds without the full content in the RSS feed. Apparently, even sites which post only text can exceed their allotment of bandwidth. This is news to me… But I suppose I underestimated either the size of the readership or the common courtesy of the readers. Of course, by that I mean that you would be doing your favorite blogs a nice favor if you could avoid fetching their RSS feed once per minute… Especially blogs which are only updated once or twice daily.
I use BlogLines for all of my news reading, which seems to be on an update schedule somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour. The good thing about BlogLines though is that it fetches your feed only once for all the users of BlogLines who read your feed.
I’d like to make a suggestion though for site owners whose RSS feed does consume a lot of their bandwidth… Host your feed with FeedBurner. They provide a pretty good set of “circulation” statistics, to help you track the size of your readership. But, perhaps most useful of all, they actually cache your feed and serve it up for you. They refresh their cached version once every 30 minutes. And it’s free. They have a “pro” version which offers more statistics and other advertising-related features, but the basic statistics and feed hosting is a free service. If you’d like to try it, but also be able to switch back transparent to your readership, they have a good suggestion on how to do that in one of their FAQs.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with FeedBurner, nor do I receive any sort of referral bonus if you try their service. I’m just a happy user.
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