* Lance Lavandowska <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-05-04 19:00]: > In the toy aggregator I wrote I played with a scheduler that > tried to throttle itself based on the feeds response.
I believe that is the right way to do this, though your algorithm is a little too simple IMHO. A better approach for Atom consumers in absence of applicable HTTP headers would be to intelligently calculate an average update interval based on atom:published / atom:updated / etc. [ Of course, for RSS feeds without pubDate and any applicable HTTP headers, the algorithm is a *lot* more complicated. Something like exponential backoff with a low radix reducing (not resetting) the backoff depending on the number of new items you got would keep the update interval close to an ideal. ] Furthermore Iâd suggest not giving users any option to manually change intervals â only a way to force a refresh immediately. This is a usability win. When I started using an aggregator, I never had any idea what value to realistically supply when the aggregator asked me how often I wanted a feed to be refreshed. How is my grandfather supposed to make an intelligent decision? And why should he? The software has all the information it needs to refresh about as often as it can expect to find new content. This entire issue is just a matter of lazy aggregator implementors, IMO. Regards, -- Aristotle
