On Sat, 29 May 2004 17:24:53 +0200, Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de>
wrote:
Rad Geek schrieb:
> How would users be directed to the right server? Would they just go to
> the front page of the data that the feed is syndicating, and find a
> link to the (offsite) URI? Or would there be some other mechanism?
This reply here from me might reveal me as the
greatest greenhorn in IT
world ever but I wasn't thinking of load balancing at all. I have some
gigabyte of traffic per month to spend and some hard disk space and the
feed file from current headlinews would be less than 5 KByte. A refresh
rate of 5-15 Minutes does make use of the HTTP 304 status code, doesn't
it?
Unless your server is odd, sure, this won't be much of a worry if you have
lots of traffic to spare. But I'm still not sure I understand what you're
proposing. And, in any case, I think I wasn't clear when I was expressing
my worry.
The worry is this: the point of having a syndicated feed is for users who
consume the normal content ("In the News"-style content on WikiPedia in
this case) to be able to find it, and put it into a feed reader or news
aggregator of some kind. So the question is: if (1) you are going to be
creating feeds for WikiPedia (en: or de:), but (2) they are going to be
hosted on *your* server rather than WikiPedia's servers, then that raises
the question of (3) how are the prospective users going to find out where
the feeds *are* hosted?
When you first made the proposal, I thought that what you meant was that
the MediaWiki software would generate a feed of the content in this
section, and that it would supply a link (through an <a
href="...">...</a>
element, a <link rel="alternate" .../> element, or both) to the location
where the file can be retrieved from WikiPedia. After you clarified that
you were thinking of hosting it on *your* server, I assumed that you meant
something more along the lines of WikiPedia generating the file, your
server mirroring it from WikiPedia, and directing users over to the feed
on your server *instead of* directing them to the feed on WikiPedia's
servers.
*If* that's what you're proposing, then you solve the problem of adding
extra load to WikiPedia's servers (since only a few sources--your mirror
server, and anyone else who has a mirror server) is accessing the feed,
and everyone else is getting the feed from your server instead of
WikiPedia's. But it creates a new problem: WikiPedia now needs to know the
URI to the feed on *your* server, and present it to people reading the "In
the news" section, in order for users to be able to get the feed from
where you want them to get it.
That's not a very tricky problem; I was just wondering what you had in
mind to solve it: if, for example, you intended to have those who maintain
the "In the news" section insert a link to your mirror of the newsfeed
manually, or if you had some more automated method in mind.
But, as I said, I don't know anymore if I've even clearly understood what
it was that you had in mind. If this is all based on a misreading on my
part, I apologize.
-C
--
Charles Johnson <technophilia(a)radgeek.com>
AIM: AiPuch
WWW:
http://www.radgeek.com/
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client:
http://www.opera.com/m2/