I need to find out if something has changed in a website using an RSS Feed. My solution was to constantly download the entire rss file, get the entries.length and compare it with the last known entries.length. I find it to be a very inelegant solution. Can anyone suggest a different approach?
Details:
• My application is an html file which uses javascript. It should be small enough to function as a desktop gadget or a browser extension.
• Currently, it downloads the rss file every thirty seconds just to get the length.
• It can download from any website with an Rss feed.
Comments and suggestions are appreciated, thanks in advance~ ^^
Many RSS feeds use the
<lastBuildDate>element, which is a child of<channel>, to indicate when they were last updated. There’s also a<pubDate>element, child of<item>, that serves the same purpose. If you plan on reading ATOM feeds, they have the<updated>element.