4 ms·
It's not really funny — because when you actually do care about the underlying feed parsing, you end up searching in vain for a replacement among readers that a
by bonaldi 13y ago
It's not really funny — because when you actually do care about the underlying feed parsing, you end up searching in vain for a replacement among readers that are, as you say, lazy prettification on top of bad fetch/parse engines.
Google Reader had become amazing at getting updates virtually as soon as they were published. I've been comparing how well the competitors do, and some of them are more than 30 minutes later than Reader at finding and showing stories.
- simcop2387 13y agoThis is likely because Google had such a large userbase that they were able to update more people's feeds at the same time than a lot of other places like newsblur and feedly can right now. I also imagine it's because google was requesting the feeds more often than others, or leveraging the feedburner system to know when they were updated and other such things.
- sergiosgc 13y agoGoogle Reader implemented PuSH:Pubsubhubbub (worst protocol name ever!). Most blog platforms ping using PuSH, so the update needs no polling and is thus almost instantaneous.
- edavis 13y agoIf anyone is looking to play around with PuSH, http://superfeedr.com/ http://superfeedr.com/ has been a joy to work with. There's also a reference implementation available at https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/. It handles all the "dirty" parts of feed reading (checking for new items, normalizing fields) and adds near instant updates for sites that ping hubs. When I finally get around to writing my own feed reader, I definitely plan on using it.
- caycep 13y agoSome protocol developer had a sick sense of humor
- bradfitz 13y agoYou're welcome. :)
- simcop2387 13y agoNeat. I had no idea that such a protocol existed let alone that it'd have such a ... colorful ... name that makes it hard to find :) I wonder how hard this would be to get it implemented in some of the other readers.
- cpeterso 13y agoThe Google Reader blog (back in 2005!) had a great post detailing many of the XML validation errors their feed crawler found and must workaround: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds.html http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds...
- davidjohnstone 13y agoThe funny thing about Hacker News (and most other places) is that if you explain everything you end up writing a tome that nobody ends up reading. That is to say, I completely agree with you. Google Reader had an excellent backend (being used by 90%+ of people meant there was a virtuous cycle happening), and I especially noticed this when I developed a prototype backend that I never actually used. Deciding how frequently to check feeds is complicated. In the end, given that this is a side project, I'm never going to be able to compete with the big players, especially at scale, and to be frank, I don't find this side of it as interesting or enjoyable to develop. The good news is that this frontend could be modified to work with another backend if there was a good reason to do so.
- readme 13y agoA lot of the major feeds out there don't even return valid RSS or atom. So, the problem begins when you have to start adding heuristics to your parser just to get it right.