10.4: Change Safari's RSS update frequency

May 05, '05 08:48:00AM

Contributed by: phoem

Tiger only hintNew in OS X 10.4, Safari has RSS capabilities which automatically refresh feeds every 30 minutes. In my opinion, this is not often enough. You can change how often the feeds update by doing the following from Terminal (quit Safari first):

$ defaults write com.apple.Syndication AgentCheckInterval 300
$ defaults write com.apple.Syndication RefreshInterval 300
You can replace 300 with the number of seconds you wish to wait between refreshses.

[robg adds: Speaking as a webmaster, please don't set this value to some ridiculously low number -- if you do, and your neighbor does, and their neighbor does, etc., the resulting load on the webserver can be quite notable. The RSS feed here is already the most-requested page, and there are still quite a few RSS users (or their reader programs) out there that like to check it every two minutes, 24 hours a day ... despite the fact that hints here (the only thing in the RSS feed) are usually only updated once per day. So please, show some restraint :).

This is one reason I still prefer external RSS readers like PulpFiction -- you can usually control the update frequency on each feed separately, instead of en masse. If you're looking at a headline news site, for instance, 10 minutes might make sense. But for hints and other "daily-ish" sites, a much lower interval is all you need to stay current. As a general rule, I think 30 minutes is a reasonable average when you can only stick one time on all your RSS updates.]

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Mac OS X Hints
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