July 23, 2004

More on InfoWorld's RSS/Apache optimization

More excellent suggestions from Sam Ruby:


Finer points of serving feeds
  • redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302.  Infoworld is currently redirecting from news.rdf to news.xml with a HTTP 302 which is a temporary redirect.  Consumers will follow the redirect, but will continue to issue requests against the original URL, resulting in double the number of requests.

    • Done. Not sure why the rdf/xml redirect wasn't R=permanent....

  • supporting either gzip or deflate encoding
  • Adding a encoding declaration in the XML prolog or http headers.  Omitting this information is typically is an indication that encoding issues haven't been thought through.  Infoworld feeds will likely will have problems with «Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn» and with characters like «‘’“”–—».

    • Will take a look at these two on Monday. =)

  • Using a content-type of application/xml instead of text/xml.  This is related to the encoding/charset discussion above.

    • Done as well. Thanks for the excellent suggestions. I'll run things through the Validator and see what I come up with.

    Posted by Kevin Railsback at July 23, 2004 10:53 PM | TrackBack
    Comments

    Wow, it sounds like you guys have quite the RSS readership. I just started re-subscribing to feeds after getting a new machine and reconfiguring my Mozilla client.

    Anyway, I'm curious to see how you continue to address the server load issues. It's been a litle while since I've been in touch with you guys. How is the CMS doing lately, by the way?

    Posted by: Rich Moffitt at July 26, 2004 04:01 PM