{"id":211,"date":"2003-04-08T22:40:06","date_gmt":"2003-04-08T22:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"tag:owlfish.com,2004:colinweblog.20030408224006"},"modified":"2003-06-30T23:21:00","modified_gmt":"2003-06-30T23:21:00","slug":"08042003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2003\/04\/08042003\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on a publish-subscribe service for RSS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sidhe.org\/~dan\/blog\/archives\/000159.html\">posting by Dan<\/a> on the way we use RSS to notify users about updates to weblogs inspired me to consider an alternative.  It&#8217;s not immediately clear that the polling of a web-server once an hour using conditional GET of an RSS feed is really a problem.  As I say in the starting paragraph of my new article on the subject:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nI&#8217;ve seen it estimated that a conditional HTTP GET on an RSS file takes about 200 bytes of bandwidth.  That&#8217;s not very much at all, even with a thousand clients polling once per hour the total bandwidth cost in a month will be about 137MB.  It&#8217;s still worth looking at alternatives though to see whether there is a more efficient way of being notified when a weblog is updated.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Is it worth the development effort required to reduce this kind of load?  If we did, would it really work?  I&#8217;m not convinced yet, but I have taken a stab at describing a web service that could by implemented as an alternative.  I did consider existing alternatives like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pipetree.com\/jabber\/headlines.html\">headline distribution in Jabber<\/a>, but they still rely on polling at the end of the day.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/thoughts\/cnws-2003-04-08.html\">Here&#8217;s my proposal<\/a>, if you are interested in this sort of thing I would appreciate the feedback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A posting by Dan on the way we use RSS to notify users about updates to weblogs inspired me to consider an alternative. It&#8217;s not immediately clear that the polling of a web-server once an hour using conditional GET of an RSS feed is really a problem. As I say in the starting paragraph of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}