intertwingly

It’s just data

mod speedyfeed


Garrett Rooney: What does it do?  In short, it allows you to only send new entries in your Atom feeds down to the clients. The client program adds a few HTTP headers (a If-Modified-Since to tell you what the last time they got was and an A-IM that indicates you support the 'feed' IM) and things just magically work.  Best of all, the content that's sent down, while smaller, remains valid Atom XML, so no real change is needed on the client side other than sending the new headers.

It looks to me that the delta required for clients that already support If-Modified-Since is to add exactly one header on the request: A-IM: feed.  This would work together with support for things like gzip, making the total request look something like this:

GET /asdf/atom.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: asdf.blogs.com
If-Modified-Since: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:18:36 GMT
Accept-Encoding: gzip
A-IM: feed

... with the last line being the only addition.  Note: compression techniques (like gzip) can be handled either as content-encoding or instance-manipulation.

Now, the question is: can we get one or more major hosting providers to deploy this filter (and patch)?  And clients to add this one line?

Update: Removed gzip from A-IM example above.  It is legal to include it there; but for now, let's settle on the example above as being recommendation for the moment.