Incoherent Babble

Now that I’ve been using FeedLounge for a while, I’ve noticed one key problem.

Since I started using FeedLounge, I’ve been maintaining multiple RSS readers. It’s Onfolio and FeedLounge on Windows, and NewsGator Online and FeedLounge on my Linux laptop. It’s a pain in the butt to keep up with multiple readers, but after putting all your eggs in one alpha-released basket and getting burned once, you’ll learn your lesson quickly (no, it wasn’t FeedLounge that burned me).

Since I’ve been using multiple readers simultaneously, I have noticed one key problem in the FeedLounge system - update frequency. According to their documentation, they take the average time between updates for a feed and update at twice that interval (ie: if a feed has a new post every 8 hours, they update every 4).

This sounds really great in theory, but in practice, I’ve noticed that quite often NewsGator updates feeds and has new items ready for viewing much more frequently than FeedLounge. Unfortunately, I can’t find anywhere on their site where they specify how often their feeds are updated, but I’d hazard to guess every 2 hours (which seems to be a standard across all RSS readers in general). No, I haven’t done any actual tests, but suffice it to say it’s a big difference (otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed it).

I know this is a tough area to change. You have to ballance update frequency and server / bandwidth load. For the casual reader, I’m sure the FeedLounge approach is just fine. If they only check once or twice a day to read all the new news, I don’t see any reason every 4 or so hours would be a problem. For those of us with 100 feeds and a growing addiction to RSS, however, it’s a different story. I can’t go more than an hour without checking up to see if there’s any breaking news I should be aware of. Even at work, I’m constantly hitting refresh, just to see what’s going on. The way I see it, part of my job is to keep up-to-date on the latest news in the tech industry, so it’s not a big deal.

So, what do you think Alex? Could we up the refresh frequency when you guys get some more server horsepower setup? Maybe this would make a good feature for paying customers (who would logically be more RSS-addicted than the casual free user)…

Maybe if I link to Greg Reinacker’s blog enough, he’ll tell us NewsGator Online’s secret update interval…