Regular Sucking Schedule
Regular Sucking Schedule is a blog from Glenn Fleishman about the problems of RSS sucking up bandwidth.

Two data points that reflect the stupidity of users.

1) A couple of years ago I did a PHP version of Aaron Swartz' tool for generating RSS from BlogSpot and Blogger when those services didn't do RSS. http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php
I turned this off more than a year go, but I still get hits from people trying to collect it. And there are still people with Rssify in their blog templates. eg. http://snunes.blogspot.com/

2) I also wrote some PHP code to scrape Google News searches and turn it into RSS.
http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php
I had to close this down as well due to bandwidth problems. Now it
generates nothing but a new item each day saying "It's closed down, stop
asking for it". Some people either don't read or can't read. eg http://www.mortgage-blog.com/

There's some lessons here.
- Aggregators that don't do something about dead feeds are mean and nasty.
- Writing code to use a free service elsewhere on the web and then walking away is mean and nasty.
- Blogs and websites with no contact information at all are mean and nasty.

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[ 12-Dec-04 4:01pm ] [ , ]