April 28, 2003
Step away from the aggregator...
Apparently slashdot is starting to feel it's own pain. Now they're limiting use of RSS downloads to only once an hour. That and in classic slashdot style they're being hard-asses about it. This is GREAT news. Not everyone shares this opinion.
Frankly, I've yet to see a feed that was worth polling anywhere near more than once an hour.
Sure, new content may indeed emerge during that hour's time. But so f'ing what! Unless you're chained to the machine 24x7 there's no reason to interrupt your life by constantly beating the crap out of webservers by flailing endlessly on the reload button. It's rude and it wastes tremendous amounts of bandwidth. Stop being so selfish and needy.
I'm not saying feeds aren't interesting. They are. What I'm saying that, in the face of all the demands put upon our time, bitching that a feed can't be constantly reloaded comes across as pretty ridiculous. Go do what you're supposed to be doing instead of reading feeds/blogs.
Take a chill folks, that you're able to read the staggering number of sites I've seen in some blogrolls (mine included) is thanks to the lightweight nature of RSS.
To complain that someone's taken issue with wasting resources and stopped folks from being so greedy is just ridiculous.
Now, reader programs do need better schedulers. Fortunately several developers who've contacted me indicate they're taking renewed interest in this area.
