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I love RSS but this approach worries too much. It's static content, at least as static as the rest of your content, so write once and let one of a dozen CDNs c
by oliwarner 2y ago
I love RSS but this approach worries too much.
It's static content, at least as static as the rest of your content, so write once and let one of a dozen CDNs cache it for you for free. They will do a good job of setting cache headers for you. If people want to ignore them and honk on it from their crappy readers, that's on them.
Even if you're personally serving it from your kitchen toaster, it's static content. You need a significant number of bad actors for this to be a problem.
Moreover, if this post is anything to go by, treating a bad reader with a logical hurdle and expecting a sane result is baffling.
It's not worth this much headspace.
- kkfx 2y agoAre you sure it's static? How many regularly update the same article after having published it, just for instance?
- soapdog 2y agoExactly. Mine is not static for example, but I’m a low traffic blog and it is not a problem yet.
- oliwarner 2y agoI do. But that still falls well into the umbrella of WORM for me. In practice, my SSG generates my RSS at the same time as my website and it's all running under Cloudflare Pages so it's just deployed and I don't have to think about any of it past the git commit. I think that's what I'm trying to get at here. If you're dynamically generating RSS for a dynamic blog today, you've made some significant design errors.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoNo they haven’t. They just may have not yet optimised for a problem that they’re not facing. Most websites are very very low-traffic. A world exists outside of web scale. Sheesh.
- madeofpalk 2y agoThis article is clearly about clients requesting a URL every 5 minutes is too much for them. They have this problem.
- kevincox 2y agoIt's "mostly static". I just tell my CDN to cache HTML for 10min. This makes the origin server load trivial but still makes updates go live fairly quickly.
- rakoo 2y agoI don't like this approach: it means that instead of fixing the problem, we just put the problem under the rug and let a third-party centralize always more of our communications, giving them absurd power over our infrastructure. That's not an engineering solution, that's a politician solution.
- oliwarner 2y agoThe reason I tolerate the power over our infrastructure is that it's completely escapable. Building and caching my blog can be done well and freely by a dozen services, and it can easily fall back to me on my server if all else fails. If we were talking about edge functions and proprietary integrations, that might be a more significant issue, but static websites are insanely easy to push off to CDN services.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoWow! you can get the exact same innovative service as geocities! that's so cool and proves we are not stuck or anything. yeah edge functions or god fordid hosting something on your network to the world is too professional.
- rakoo 2y agoWhen so many replies say "just use cloudflare" I disagree: it means our way of resolving this problem is to rely on machinery that costs millions if not tens of millions to build. That's like saying it's ok to build cities and our lives around cars because you can totally change your car provider at any time and they all have your best interest in mind.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoHow about arguing against the point being made instead of your analogy, which presents a scenario that does not at all match the original one. Who said anything about having your best interest in mind? Cosplay as a lone wolf all you want, but the reality is that people, especially the sort of people that know how to configure a CDN, wouldn’t last a minute without the support of others, delivered through capitalism or otherwise.