RSS feed sends full blog occasionally with no updates

[Assaf Urieli <as...@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I have proposed to users to subscribe to an RSS feed of my blog through
BlogTrottr ( http://blogtrottr.com/ )

Every so often, without any blog activity on my side, BlogTrottr feeds the
entire blog (all entries) to my e-mail address (and presumably to all other
subscribers).

I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this, and whether the error lies with
Roller or with the BlogTrottr RSS client.

Is Apache Roller sending details for the entire blog every time the RSS
feed is requested? Is it up to the RSS client to decide which entries
should be e-mailed and which shouldn't, or is the server somehow involved
in the decision?

Also: I have a new feature request (after I resolve this problem). Would it
be difficult to mark certain updates as "minor" so that they don't get
included in the RSS feed (e.g. by not updating the publishing date)? I want
to avoid including a certain entry in the RSS feed if all I did was fix a
spelling mistake.

Rgds,
Assaf

Re: RSS feed sends full blog occasionally with no updates

[Dave <sn...@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 8:13 AM, Assaf Urieli <as...@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have proposed to users to subscribe to an RSS feed of my blog through
> BlogTrottr ( http://blogtrottr.com/ )
>
> Every so often, without any blog activity on my side, BlogTrottr feeds the
> entire blog (all entries) to my e-mail address (and presumably to all other
> subscribers).
>
> I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this, and whether the error lies with
> Roller or with the BlogTrottr RSS client.
>
> Is Apache Roller sending details for the entire blog every time the RSS
> feed is requested? Is it up to the RSS client to decide which entries
> should be e-mailed and which shouldn't, or is the server somehow involved
> in the decision?
>

Roller sends the most recent X entries in the blog every time the RSS feed
is requested. The feed contains a lastBuildDate field which indicates the
publish timestamp of the most recent item in the feed. Each item in the
feed also includes a pubDate field that indicates when the field was
published and an ID.

It is up to the RSS client to decide if an entry has been seen before and
some simply use the date fields to do this. Other RSS clients may do some
sort of hash to compare the contents of entries with the same IDs (from new
and old versions of the feed) and decide if the entry has changed -- so, if
you make changes that cause old entries to be updated then the RSS client
may think the entry is new.


Also: I have a new feature request (after I resolve this problem). Would it
> be difficult to mark certain updates as "minor" so that they don't get
> included in the RSS feed (e.g. by not updating the publishing date)? I want
> to avoid including a certain entry in the RSS feed if all I did was fix a
> spelling mistake.
>

I'm not absolutely sure, but I don't think that is necessary. We don't
believe we update the pubDate when you make a change to an entry.

- Dave