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Reducing bandwidth charges
Authored by: mzajac on Oct 30, '03 01:49:08PM

How about a separate feed with just the latest 50 or 100 headlines, without excerpts instead, or in addition to the existing one?

Anyway, there are plenty of techniques you can use to reduce bandwidth for both HTML and RSS files. Some of these require the RSS feed reader to support the technology too, but I think most of them have been pretty good at keeping up.

Here's a proposition, Rob: if you can use any of these suggestions to save more than 15% in bandwidth, how about giving us a better RSS feed?

  • Ask your server administrator to enable mod_gzip, to compress web pages and RSS files on the fly. On a text-heavy site like mocosxhints.com this could save LOTS of bandwidth. It looks like you could reduce transfers by 80% on your home page! Pages will load faster too.
  • If you can't make that happen, add a line of PHP to the top of the template to gzip your files. This should be easy even if you have to hack into geeklog to change the templates.
  • I notice from NetNewsWire's stats window that your RSS feed is being sent even if it hasn't changed. I had a quick look at the server headers, and it appears that the server is sending a different modified date and etag header with each request, even if the feed hasn't changed -- this is wrong behaviour. Get the server to only change the etag when the feed has changed. Then the RSS reader will load the whole feed when it's been updated, otherwise it will only transfer a few bytes of headers. About etags.

I'm not an expert, but send me an email and I'll be glad to give you advice about this stuff.

PS: I got the headers using "curl -i http://www.macosxhints.com/backend/geeklog.rdf" in the terminal.



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