Earth Notes: General Bibliography (podnews2024testing)
General public bibliography for EOU and related research. #bibliography #dataset
- [podnews2024testing] James Cridland Podcast RSS feed testing (accessed ), Podnews, (dataset) (BibTeX).
abstract
RSS feeds are how podcasting works - but most podcast apps rely on repeatedly polling RSS feeds. Podnews publishes just one podcast ourselves, but that podcast's RSS feed is requested more than 42,000 times a day. We wondered who supports compression in feeds like gzip or brotli (which saves around 80% of bandwidth); and also who supports lastmodified headers and/or etag (i.e. how easy it is to spot whether a feed has been updated.) We tested a set of feeds - the most popular 100 hosts or so - from our podcast sample; we've linked to the specific RSS feed we tested. To test compression, we requested the content using an Accept-Encoding header.
note
[A significant fraction (about 14%?) did not support any of gzip (or br) nor last-modified (or etag). About 9% supported all of them.]