CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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jcayzac
jcayzac

Reputation: 1461

Empty RSS/Atom feed only pointing to next chunk?

If my feed contains 0 item and only has the paginated feed information, and items start in the "next" chunk, will most software consuming feeds see my items?

Basically, I want all my contentful feeds to have their content hash in their filename (e.g. feed.a8f2bc34.xml) and be served as immutable resources (cache-control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable), and the only mutated feed is the empty, top-level one (feed.xml).

Upvotes: 0

Views: 20

Answers (1)

Joe
Joe

Reputation: 31057

will most software consuming feeds see my items?

tl;dr: I would expect no.

This is really two questions: what feed reader are my consumers using? And do those feed readers support RFC 5005?

The only major feed reader I could find that mentioned that RFC was NewsBlur:

[...] A second technique is to use RFC 5005, which supports links embedded inside the RSS feed to denote next and previous pages of an archive.

NewsBlur attempts all of these techniques on every single feed you’ve subscribed to, and when it’s done backfilling stories, you’ll receive an email showing you how big your archive grew during this backfill process.

Anecdotally, this comment from 2023 suggests that mainstream support is not there:

There is RFC 5005, Feed Paging and Archiving, which enables that, but feedreader support is practically nonexistent.

For your actual goal:

and the only mutated feed is the empty, top-level one (feed.xml).

You may be able to achieve something similar by having your feed.xml redirect with 307 to the latest immutable version. It's very possible that some feed readers will get confused by this and persist the redirection.

Upvotes: 0

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