RSS Feeds

[Mick_L]

So how do RSS feeds work, and what determines their refresh frequency.

All of my favourite sites are subscribed to via RSS feed, some of which have local origins, in particular Radio Geek here, A beer in every pub, an awesome travel blog, and another that serves as a sort of media watch site. I find these very tardy in updating, in some cases taking a week to alert me of a new post, while other sites around the place update very quickly indeed, often inside an hour of a new post arriving. So I assume it's not my system here that determines how often it gets updated, so what's the story?

Thanks in advance for not making me search this out myself (so far)

[Mick_L]

ah... good to see that the resident geeks are back on deck.

Therefore....


*Bump*

 

[The Radio Geek]

Hi there Mick !

Going to answer your question on the radio today!  10:30 am - yes, you will be the first one up for the year!

Cheers,

:)RG

[Mick_L]

Excellent news. I type this as you are about to go to air - in Cairns. I am in Townsville. grrrr. This show needs to be nationally synidacted, podcast or streamed. Hope you see this before you go live and put the weights on ABC Far North Management

[wdrc_ncc]

There is an excellent tutorial here:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1771&page=2

[The Radio Geek]

Thanks Graham!

The short answer is that it is a little of both.  The RSS feed itself is basically a single file summary of what is new on a particular website.  The then relies on two parts, the generation of the RSS feed file itself, and the checking of it by your RSS reader of choice.

Many RSS readers can be configured to check the feeds every X frequency, some where between  "continuous" to "every X minutes/hours/days" or even  "manually whenever I say".  This will affect the frequency of the updates coming through.

Of course, if nothing has changed in the website feed file, then you will see no updates!  Generally most websites with an RSS feed have a setting so that this is automatically updated whenever new content is added anytime to the site.  I guess it is possible to have the file updated every "X-minutes/hours/days" but could not really see the point.

Anyway - there it is.  The frequency of the updates depends firstly on how often the content actually is changed, how often the website is configured to update it's feed file, and then lastly by how often your RSS reader is configured to check the website feed.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Robert.