this may or may not be a silly question but I know little of the mysterious ways of RSS feeds, so hopefully someone can put me straight!
I have a website with an RSS feed of news items. A user has complained that the feed is updating crazily frequently, without any change in the top 5 news items displayed.
I’m ashamed to say that I don’t use RSS feeds much personally, so I don’t even really know what it implies for one to be “updating too often” – I can see how it would be annoying, if you keep checking an “updated feed” only to find no new content, or even worse if you are receiving continual alerts of non-existent updates. But as I say, I don’t have a clear picture of how RSS feed consumption generally works.
The next question is, if the way our site is generating its RSS feed is a problem, what can I do about it? The top news items aren’t changing incredibly frequently. It’s possible, but not certain, that automated scripts are updating items in the database that are related to news items, though even still, I can’t imagine how this would be happening “crazily frequently”. RSS feeds, how do they work? Would a re-generation of the top news items count as an update for everyone’s RSS readers, even if the top news items are to all intents and purposes exactly the same as before?
If it’s relevant, the RSS feed is being generated by standard CakePHP helpers for the purpose.
Anyone have any insights into RSS issues of this sort, and can put me on the right track to a solution?
EDIT: Okay, I subscribed to the feed using Safari as the default RSS reader and indeed, over the course of the afternoon I had two identical copies of each news item in my inbox. I’m pretty sure no new “real” news items are being generation, so something must be registering with the RSS readers as an update, and I don’t know what. My question may not have been very clear (argh, downvote) but it still stands!
An RSS feed is a feed that can be parsed(understood) by computers easily. There are more than enough sources explaining RSS(XML). Like for example this wiki page about RSS has an example of a feed.
If I understand you correctly he is subscribed to a feed that gets updated every time an update(news) is created. He finds this happens more often than he would like and he likes to have a feed containing only the most important news items. So if I understand you should provide a new different feed(another url) to the most popular updates.
I would also like to inform you about PubSubHubBub(hubbub) to make your feeds realtime. When the consumers(who like to parse your feed) are using hubbub protocol this information is pushed(gets delivered) instead of polling(asking all the time if there is any new information available probably without any new information being available).