atom
Aug 18, 2006
Back (once again)
Serving syndicated content non-statically can be dangerous
So, tomster.org is back again... kind of... After lots of experimenting with CacheFu and the Firefox plugin HTTP LiveHeaders and looking at my Apache logs I finally found out, what could have been the cause for the dismal performance of this site:
- tomster.org currently has an average of ca. 3900 pageviews per day
- 25% of which are for for my atom or rss feeds
- none of which ever returned a
304 Not ModifiedCode!
But having narrowed down the problem, I was now able to take measures. After a bit of RTFM (CacheFu's that is) and looking at its control panel I found the solution: I had to add the feed-ids to the list of cacheable templates, like so:
This was possible, because the site-product for tomster.org provides its own ZPT-templates for the atom feeds which take precedence over the atom.xml Five view that Quills' basesyndication Product provides. Because sadly, I haven't found a way (yet) how to make Five views cachable -- which is why the RSS feed of this site is still being (re-)generated for every request. Luckily, 80% of feed views access the atom feeds and not the RSS.
So, if anybody has any idea on how to make CacheFu cache Five views, please speak up!
While I was playing around with CacheFu I added the WeblogEntry content type to its 'content rule' and Weblog and WeblogArchive to its 'container rule' -- with the result that also the front page is now able to return 304s.
Now, the way I understand it, this won't speed up access for first-time visitors at all, but clicking back and forth on tomster.org has become noticably snappier -- and, of course, all those feedreaders out there, will only retrieve a feed if it's actually changed.
I hope, we can sort this out for the Five views, though -- or else any Quills instance could quickly turn a plonesite into a snail -- and we don't want that...
Dec 16, 2005
More Atomic food
I'm really running out of excuses...
I guess how do you celebrate Atom's promotion to RFC 4287? Why by cooking up even more reading material.
I realize I really need to get more of a grasp on the basics of syndication. It has just recently come to my attention, that the RSS version of tomster.org's feed includes all entries, not just the standard last 15... NNW2.0 (as compared to the current 2.0.1) doesn't display my atom feed anymore, ever since I foolishly upgraded it from the 0.3 spec to the final 1.0. I wonder how many other feedreaders out there have stopped displaying this feed?
Is anyone still reading this? While it's nice from a hacker/developer point of view to stay current, I think I'll have to a) downgrade my atom feed back to 0.3 for a while (what? the next two years?!?) and b) give the RSS/RDF versions a bit more attention.
Dec 11, 2005
Atomic food
From the RTFM-Department
Ah, weekend… Sunday to be precise. Time for this geek to spend some quality time with the family, in the kitchen and… yup, the Atom Publishing Protocol..
Interesting timing, though: One reason (besides having to work for a living) I’m making such slow progress on my project to implement APP (for Quills as a starter) is that it’s not really ironed out yet and lacks sample implementations and documentation. But the longer I wait, the better it gets ;-) A rather good example for such progress is Joe Gregorio’s latest article at xml.com Catching Up with the Atom Publishing Protocol.
Also, perhaps today might be a good time to attempt to convert my atom templates to include xhtml rather than escaped content. Uche Ogbuji’s article Handling Atom Text and Content Constructs should come in handy for that.
And finally, I’d like to propose that weekends should be extended by an additional sunday to comprise of three days rather than two. I’m sure we can all agree, right? Perhaps we should start with a RFC on that…
Nov 25, 2005
Atom Publishing explained
From the RTFM-Department
In my ongoing (no pun intended!) quest for implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol for Quills and frustration in lack of documentation I have received come across a concise birds-eye-view summary of what the APP is all about from one of the members of the Atom Working Group himself, i.e. Tim Bray (hence the pun).
As I’m currently still lying in bed with a nasty cold and stomach flu (since yesterday) I might get some quality hacking time in between watching Daily Show Reruns, Sopranos, Blogging and trips to the toilet and use the aforementioned article to implement some more APP functions instead of all that nonsense work-for-money stuff ;-)
