A Penguin in the Orchard

Tech Curmudgeon

Ahem. Tech Curmudgeon, here, with a word of advice.

Everyone seems to be catching the RSS feed fever. I know I build it into my sites and use my feed reader religiously. Everybody loves those little chunks of news that move so easily across the ‘Net.

But a feed that includes the full text of every entry for the past month doesn’t really save much bandwidth now, does it? Tech Curmudgeon says, “For the love of RSS, limit the number of articles you make available to your readers!”

This becomes an issue if, like Tech Curmudgeon, you read the snippets from your favorite sites when you should actually be doing some work. Of course, nobody at work really understands what Tech Curmudgeon does, so it might not really matter after all. But it does get annoying to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll past articles that are more than a week old - articles that have required scrolling for more than a week, fer bandwidth’s sake! Really - shouldn’t that wasted time be spent reading rather than scrolling?

If you’re using Moveable Type, you have virtually no excuse. A simple modification to the RSS template files will do the trick. Open them up for editing. Look for a line that says, “MTEntries lastn=”. If there are two of these lines, change the second. Change the number in quotes to something less than six dozen. Rebuild the templates.

What’s a reasonable number? If you post daily, maybe 7 would work. Give your readers a whole week’s worth. If you post every five minutes 24-7 like Scoble, maybe 15 or even 20 - a couple hours of entries. Your server will thank you. Your readers will thank you. Tech Curmudgeon will thank you.