I have a pet peeve. When a big company jumps on a technology bandwagon, I expect their software to work at least as well as the little guys. In this instance I’m talking about RSS feeds. Once the friend of bloggers everywhere, now it’s being picked up by all manner of news sites. Badly much of the time I might add. In this case I’m talking about the ABCnews tech feed and the Reuters tech feed, though they are by no means the only offenders. I have around 60 feeds I read on a daily basis to stay up to date with the latest tech news and many of the feeds are from blogs or small news sites. I find it ironic that the little guys got it right and the big guys feeds seem to insist that you download all the top stories each time your reader checks for updates. The result is that my feed folders for those sites are full of multiple entries for the same headlines. Come on guys, RSS isn’t rocket science, it’s XML and fairly simple XML at that. If your tech guys can’t get that right they shouldn’t be writing about tech issues. Getting your RSS feeds working correctly is to your own benefit. If your readers are only download new additions, then you’re saving bandwidth, if your feeds cause them to download the whole lot every time they check for updates, you’ll not only increase users annoyance, you’ll also be increasing the bandwidth drain on your site. Remember, conditional GET is a good thing folks.
