rachelbythebay - feed info

Want to get automatic updates when a new post goes up, or a recent post changes? You probably want to subscribe to the Atom feed. You just need an Atom feed reader program or service that plays nice.

Feed readers which send conditional requests may poll at most once per hour. You'll get updates automatically, and it'll be great.

"Feed readers" which don't send conditional requests may poll at most once per 24-hour period. If you want to check more frequently, start sending conditional requests. See the FAQ below if you need more info on how that works.

Add this to your feed reader:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml

That's the whole thing. Don't add stuff to it. It won't work. It ends with 'xml'. There are no spaces in it or any other funny characters, for that matter.

(No prize for guessing why I had to write that last paragraph.)


FAQs

Some of this is advice for feed reader authors, but users should be aware of the kinds of messes that poorly-behaved software can cause.

What's a conditional request?

You need to store one or two values every time you receive a successful response to the feed URL, and then return at least one of them to the web server every time you make a subsequent request for the feed.

Server sends: Last-Modified: xxx
Your request: If-Modified-Since: xxx

Server sends: ETag: zzz
Your request: If-None-Match: zzz

It needs to be the exact data you received. Don't try to parse it, don't try to hard-code it, and don't try to generate your own. ETags are wrapped in quotes "like this", and that's part of the value. (Really, read the RFCs. I didn't make it up.)

If nothing has changed, you'll get a 304 status in the response and can know that you're as caught up as you can possibly be.

If-Modified-Since is a truly ancient header. The first RFC mentioning it is RFC 1945, aka the HTTP/1.0 spec. It's from May 1996. If you're generating HTTP requests to other people's systems, you should know about this kind of thing.

What about the first poll?

Easy: don't set either header. It's a given that your first request will be unconditional.

What about rate limiting?

Polls that come too often will be rejected with a 429 "Too Many Requests" response. The web server is asking you to slow down. You should heed its advice.

Don't ignore 429s. Fix your feed reader or get another one. Hosts not honoring 429s may be ignored by the web server for some period of time. This process is entirely automatic.