Rachel Kroll
The "feed reader score" service that I mentioned earlier this week is now up and running. Several people reached out to me and I have sent them their unique codes and links to the instructions so they can get started.
As of about a day ago, we are now logging metadata on the requests, and as of a couple of hours ago, the reports are starting to be built. I'm still adding features to it, but it's already pretty clear that not all feed readers are built to the same standards.
This is a sample report for the sort of real programs that I see plenty on the actual site all day every day:
Time span analyzed: about 17 hours (63734.284600 sec) ------------------------------------- Number of log entries: 34 ------------------------------------- Conditional requests: 0 ------------------------------------- ā Unconditional requests: 34 One is normal for feed initialization. ------------------------------------- Good If-Modified-Since values: 0 ------------------------------------- ā Bogus If-Modified-Since values: 34 ------------------------------------- Good If-None-Match values: 0 ------------------------------------- User agent: (34) <redacted> ------------------------------------- Useless cookies: none! ------------------------------------- Useless referrers: none! ------------------------------------- Useless query parameters: none! ------------------------------------- (Still evolving. Check back later.)
I've removed the user-agent info here so you'll just have to guess at which software this might be.
As you can see, in the short time it's been reporting in, it always sends requests with broken If-Modified-Since values. This makes it get a full copy of the feed every time, and that makes it an unconditional request.
The average polling interval appears to be about 17-18 minutes. If it ran all day, it would make about 45 requests and would use about 25 MB of data that's all redundant since nothing's actually changing.
So, it begins! If you want to participate, send me some feedback and let me know. Also, to that one "wants to be a good citizen" person who indicated interest but didn't supply an e-mail address, can you try that again? Thanks.