I’ve got an application which serves an rss feed of headlines and I need to provide this rss feed to other consumers. I don’t want to provide the rss directly from my server though, due to limited server resources (processing and also bandwidth), so I need to proxy (cache) it through some service which will handle most of the traffic.
Assuming the rss feed URL of my application is http://example.com/rss I initially provided my consumers with the url http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&q=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Frss which solved my server load problem but introduced a liveness problem. The headlines are minutes to hours late from the actual feed (haven’t exactly measured how much late).
I’ve also tried distributing through feedburner so the url became something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/example123?format=xml but the liveness problem still exists.
Is there a public and free solution for this problem?
Anything below 5 minutes of liveness delay would be totally acceptable.
The way I solved it is by using the feedburner feed and pinging it (at http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com) via wget every 5 minutes with a cron job in order to update the contents of the feed. Works great!