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I received two messages asking what exactly I mean by "optimizing" RSS feeds. To give you a more technical answer, this is how our feeds work:
- The feed URL shouldn't redirect
- If clients ask for compression, then provide it
- Don't disable caching with Cache-Control
- Use an Expires header to tell clients how often to poll
- Last-Modified headers tell clients how often content is updated
- Provide an ETag
- Provide Last-Modified or ETag, so clients can make conditional requests
- Feed size should be less than 64 KB
- Conditional requests, using Last-Modified and ETag, save bandwidth and reduce server load
- If-Modified-Since alone should be honored
- If-None-Match alone should be honored
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