Posted by Toby Inkster on 11/21/06 08:36

CRON wrote:

> Do I just keep adding new topics to the top of the xml file every day
> or do I just put the new stuff in the file and delete the rest? ie. Do
> RSS readers automatically remember feed history or what?

For the sake of your own bandwidth, cut out old articles. Maintain it at a
level of about 10 to 15 articles total.

Imagine that 1000 people subscribe to your RSS feed; and on average they
download it every 2 hours. Now for every 1 KB in size that your RSS file
is, you could potentially be sending 370 MB of data! (Of course, caching
will reduce this, but many RSS clients are dumb, so caching will not
always work.)

> One more (slightly harder) question: Is it possible to add PHP to a
> feed

Of course it is; it's even possible to add PHP to a JPEG if you know what
you're doing!

Assuming your site is content managed, it's certainly easier to pull news
items or new articles from the database with a script than update the RSS
manually!

> or use a CRON job to write a feed which pulls info from a mySQL
> database?

Even better.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

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