I'm writing an RSS feed. Let's say it's for a list of entries as in a blog. How do I handle updating the feed? I mean, let's assume that The feed always displays the last 10 entries. If someone subscribes now, he'll get the last 10 entries (1..10)... what if there are for example 2 new articles, and then what will his feed reader do? Because I will return the articles (2..12). Do I have to do any special handling to start from a certain article in the feed, or do I just always put the last 10 and this will be fine
A:
Returning the last n articles will be fine. Because you assign a unique identifier to each article (you do, right?) the feed reader can easily keep track of what it has already seen or not.
The feed reader will probably watch to see how often new articles appear, to help determine how often it checks for new articles.
Greg Hewgill
2010-09-19 11:24:40
yes, I was not sure if the readers DO handle the unique identifiers...this solves if the readers check too frequently... what abt checking the feed less frequently? I mean, this way they can miss some entries, right? Is that OK?
humanzz
2010-09-19 11:31:45