[WEB4LIB] RSS feed problem; thin clients "jump" instead of refreshing, anyone tried this successfully?

[Alnisa Allgood]

At 7:24 AM -0700 7/12/04, Joan Graham wrote:
>Using code from FastBuzz.com, I placed a link to RSS news feeds on the
>home page of our site after testing in IE and Netscape. On a PC, the
>feeds refreshed every 2 seconds as set by the script. However, our
>library staff uses thin clients. On these machines, the entire page
>jumps every two seconds, so I had to remove the feeds. Our thin clients
>did this before once, when I tried to use a script that sequenced
>genealogy photos in a timed sequence, with an applet.
>
>Has anyone used RSS feeds that worked with a thin client, or, does
>anyone know where to get a script such as FastBuzz has, that avoids the
>"jumping" on the thin client? TIA.

Unfortunately, this doesn't directly answer your question, though it 
may solve your problem in part. While a number of scripts will help 
you place RSS feeds to your website, and update time intervals start 
as rapidly as 1 minute. As a responsible citizen, the current 
standard for hitting someone xml/rss feed is no more than every 15 to 
30 minutes. Many sites have 30 to 60 minute limits, that will result 
in your IP being banned if it seeks information more frequently.

The need for this is arose directly because of various news 
aggregators (rss feed readers) were checking so frequently, and 
eating up the bandwidth of the site they wanted news from. Think of 
it this way,  if your rss feed is updating every 2 minutes, your 
computer is requesting data from a single site 720 times per day. 
Even if your single request was only 2k per request in size, you 
would be pulling down over a 1MB of data per day. You can see how 
rapidly this escalates.

A basic guideline to for RSS use is never more than every 15 minutes.

Some places recommend every 30 minutes, some  every 1hr. You have the 
ability to control the frequency and should do so based on the site 
you subscribe to (how frequently do they update, every hr, once a 
day, twice a week?  If your subscribing to a site that only updates a 
few times per week, then why seek data more than once per day?), you 
also want to factor in your own bandwidth and server resources, since 
this also increases their use.

Alnisa
-- 
   .........................................
    Alnisa  Allgood
    Executive Director
    Nonprofit Tech
    (ph) 608.241.3616 (fx) 608.241.3709
    (url)  http://smart.nonprofit-tech.org
    (url)  http://www.nonprofit-tech.org
    (url)  http://www.tech-library.org
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    transforming nonprofits through technology
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