Writing

Atom feed icon Software, technology, sysadmin war stories, and more.

Monday, August 12, 2024

An update on another feed reader from its author

I've been hearing from feed reader authors as a result of the whole "feed reader score" project. Last week, it was NetNewsWire, and this week I have an update for Unread Cloud.

The author put up a post which looks at what's been going on, and explains what happened with the poll frequency for a while on that one test instance. It also has some interesting graphs built from the raw "hits" table in the report.

I should point out how overwhelmingly reasonable everyone has been for this project. It's the sort of thing that could go over very badly - trust me, I've been in the position of "detecting badness" over the years at various jobs, and a lot of people do not appreciate it!

Instead, we've been slowly patching up a few small issues here and there across the collective fleet of feed readers, and hopefully this will benefit readers and writers both. Writers get lower "background radiation" for their servers, and readers get quicker updates without tripping rate limiters. Everyone wins.

To everyone, thank you for your efforts in this ecosystem.