Frequent RSS updates?

  • Karl Jacobs

    (@karl-jacobs)


    16 years, 1 month ago

    I’m developing an internal corporate news site that will feed to an internal corporate “portal” page via RSS.

    My concern is that the RSS feed will not update frequently enough for this to be feasible to work as a mechanism for distributing corporate news updates and announcements. A 4 to 12 hour frequency just won’t do.

    So, the question is, is there a way to change the frequency of the rss updates, to something like every 15 minutes?

    Also, if there is a way to do this, what is the potential impact? And if we do this, would it be preferable to have this on a separate WPMU instance, rather than it being on a shared instance? (Is the RSS update frequency site-specific or is it WP-instance wide?)

    Thanks!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Mark Ratledge

    (@songdogtech)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    Well, this isn’t the MU forum. And second of all, RSS doesn’t work like you’re assuming. It’s pull technology, not push. When you publish a WP post, it’s made available right away on the RSS feed. But it’s up to the RSS client to ping the blog to retrieve the contents of the feed. So if you’re concerned about users seeing WP feed updates as fast as possible, set up your RSS clients to check for news every 15 minutes, or more often, if the client allows. It really has nothing to do with the frequency of WP publishing the feed.

    Thread Starter Karl Jacobs

    (@karl-jacobs)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for the explanation!

    So, my question is (that maybe I didn’t make clear in the beginning) is, what happens with WP is the client?

    The idea is to have the portal page be the client that accesses the news site. How do I have the portal page check the news site every 15 minutes?

    Yes, I do realize this is not an WPMU forum, but in a few months, it will all be one-in-the-same anyway.. 🙂

    Mark Ratledge

    (@songdogtech)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    It’s going to be different, depending on what you do. If you use something like FeedWordPress | simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress or WordPress › SimplePie Plugin for WordPress « WordPress Plugins, you can set up cron or a refresh in the plugin itself. If you simply place a feed on a page with 

    <?php include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php');
wp_rss('http://feeds.feedburner.com/wprecipes', 3); ?>

    then your end user will need to reload their page, or by reload script.

    Thread Starter Karl Jacobs

    (@karl-jacobs)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    If it refreshes whenever the page reloads, that would work. (Right now we have an ancient CGI the builds the page and calls all the elements when the page is reloaded).

    What I still need to determine what the performance impact will be with ~3,500 employees hitting this portal page at some point throughout the day, thus pinging the news site for the latest feed, as well as other sites that pull a custom feed.

    Mark Ratledge

    (@songdogtech)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    Fast box (or two or three), lots of memory, and a minimal theme for the portal page.
    High Traffic Tips For WordPress « WordPress Codex

    Thread Starter Karl Jacobs

    (@karl-jacobs)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    What about traffic on the news site (source site) that would be getting hit by the RSS calls?

    Thanks again!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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