Different Websites have Different Frequencies
The first thing to understand is that different RSS feeds may benefit from different update frequencies, although once per day is generally a good number.
The default value in many RSS clients is once per hour or once every two hours, which is too high for most websites.
Missing Articles
The key problem to worry about with update frequencies is the risk of missing articles. Let's understand why this happens and what we can do about it.
The way RSS feeds work is that an RSS client regularly downloads the RSS feed from a given URL to retrieve new articles. The RSS feed it downloads doesn't contain ALL articles, which can be a problem.
For example, let's say there's a blog with 1000 articles. It may have an RSS feed that only lists the most recent articles, and only lists 50 of them.
If they post a new article, the RSS feed will change. Your RSS client retrieves this new feed, compares the articles in the feed with what it downloaded before, and figures out what the new articles are.
If the blog posts 30 articles in a day, and your RSS client only updates once per day, you're still going to get all the new articles. However, if the blog posts 100 articles in a week, and your RSS client only updates once per week, you're going to "miss" some articles. After it posts 50 articles, the RSS feed will be completely new. And when it posts another 50, those 50 you didn't download will disappear from the RSS feed. So your RSS client won't be able to get them.
Although this volume may sound a bit ridiculous, there are some RSS feeds that change every single minute. For example, Reddit has an RSS feed for all threads posted. It's a whole social media website, so there would be hundreds of posts per minute. In this case, missing articles is a very real possibility, but on the other hand, why would you even subscribe to this volume of articles in the first place?
No Offline Updates
An RSS client can only download the RSS feed while the RSS client is running. If your computer is powered off, the RSS client can't check the feeds every hour even if it's configured to update them every hour. If you only use your PC for a few hours per day, or not even once every day, then you're already updating only once every 24 hours.
Most people don't leave their PCs running 24 hours per day, so there is not much of a point in making the updates hourly.
RSS as a Service
Nowadays there are some online services that act as RSS clients. These services would be updating constantly in their servers, so they wouldn't miss articles even if you aren't using them at the moment.
Choosing Low Volume Feeds
If you subscribe to someone's blog, and they only post once per day, and their RSS feed contains at least 30 items, all you need to do is log into your PC once per month to avoid missing articles. I don't think that sounds unreasonable. If you don't use your PC at least once per month, I suppose you're spending all your time on your smartphone, so get an RSS client for your smartphone instead and you won't have trouble.
For the record, some blogs only post once per week, and their RSS feeds may contain articles from half a year ago, so even checking once per day may be too often in some low-volume feeds.
However, let's say that you're trying to subscribe to a high-volume website, such as a news portal, or a news website. Unlike a social media, subscribing to this website's articles makes sense. Unlike a personal blog, there will be multiple authors writing at the same time, and their day job is writing articles, so there will be multiple articles written every day. The risk of missing articles is pretty high. What do we do then?
Using an hourly update frequency could help, but, something more useful would be trying to subscribe to specific low-volume feeds instead of subscribing to the entire website.
Many websites are created using WordPress, and by default WordPress creates an RSS feed for every single category and tag. This means you might be able to subscribe specifically to articles that belong to a category instead of all articles in the news website. Since these are fewer articles, their volume would be smaller, so you're less likely to miss something that interests you.
Accidentally Becoming a Botnet
Another point worth considering is that if enough people use RSS to subscribe to a website, and their update frequency is very low, they'll accidentally form a botnet.
RSS clients "automatically" updating RSS feeds is by definition automated. Most websites expect human visitors to manually visit the website, not to use bots to scrape their data. RSS is one of the few uses of automation that webmasters can agree to permit.
I don't think many people use RSS today, so that might not be such a problem, but imagine if, instead of one thousand followers on social media, a website had one thousand RSS users subscribe to their feeds. That would be 1000 hits per hour, 24 thousand hits per day, and this could be all wasted bandwidth if the website isn't posting something new every single day.
If more people start using RSS in the future, I think this could become a bigger problem because the default frequencies are too small.
Learning About the News Immediately
One caveat of setting the update frequency to once per day or once per week is that you won't learn about the newest news immediately, as your RSS client doesn't refresh them every instant.
If you really need some news right now, you could simply use the function to fetch all feeds that is found in many RSS clients to see if there's anything new to read when you feel like reading the news.
Quotes
Please don't request feeds more than once every 30 minutes.
https://slashdot.org/faq/feeds.shtml (accessed 2024-10-27)
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