RSS Feed

? about the the WebmasterWorld Rss feed and rss in general

[roscoepico]

I just purchased Trillian Pro(the all in one instant messenger) and its allowing me to enter RSS feeds and get my news this way. I haven't installs this feature yet and was wondering how the WebmasterWorld feed works and what exactly does it display?

[SmallTime]

click on it and see! - actually you will see a raw form of the linked headlines to recent posts. RSS is a syndication format for news headlines, and is much used in weblogs and newsreaders.

[roscoepico]

ok, so I haven't set it up yet, but was able to pull the info the rss feed spits out and paste it into notepad. What exactly am I seeing? Doesn't look like "recent posts" or the "WebmasterWorld Highlighted Posts", so where is this data being pulled from?

[SmallTime]

I think it is recent posts, as collected every 15 minutes.

[roscoepico]

ahhh...thats why they don't always match up when I view both at the same time. Thanks for clearing this up.

PS. How difficult is it to have the rss feed updated every 2 minutes, 5 minutes?

[chiyo]

Rose.. an RSS feed is updated whenever the publisher does it by updating the page/URL. I guess Brett has some sort of script that scans the recent posts and translates them into RSS format. If he wanted he could do this at whetever interval he wanted, but the more frequent, I guess, the more the server load, and generally RSS is not used at the moment for real time up to the minute feeds. The BBC at one stage had them updating every minute, moreover updates (I think) every 15 to 20 minutes, and only in the most active feeds, do the items change every time at this interval.

So quick answer.. its the publishers decision on how often to update. It your decision on how often to veiw the latest feed depending on your RSS reader settings.

If it is a site that is aggregating RSS feeds they usually have RSS cacheing, or set their own intervals (say once an hour or once every 15 minutes to see whether a RSS file has changed).

[Brett_Tabke]

There are 2 feeds - the homepage one, and the active list one.

The homepage feed is updated whenever the homepage is updated.

The active list one is updated every 15 mins by a cron job (same one that sends out emails). Any faster than that, and it is mostly duplcate stories anyway. I felt 15 mins was enough.

The homepage one is linked from the homepage on the lower left menu and the active list one is linked from the bottom of the active list itself.

There is also an IFRAME option [webmasterworld.com] available for those that want to put the active list on their site.

[roscoepico]

that iframe is cool. I saved it as html on my PC and by enabling "show web content on my active desktop" under properties I'm now able to have WebmasterWorld recent posts build right in to my desktop...not sure how long it'll stay there but i'm sure some might find it cool