comic RSS needs fixing (firefox)

[LetMeAsk]

I am using OOTS's RSS feed in firefox.
It contains each comic ever published, starting from number 1.

It was always like that, but the number of comics was lower and firefox used to preload the feed. Well, it doesn't anymore.

That causes substantial ammount of lag when hovering over the OOTS feed, as the giant list is parsed.
(it takes over 3 seconds :smallfrown:)

Please do something about it. Carrying a separate feed reader will probably become less annoying option around 1400 items (comics) in the feed.
Thanks

[Squark]

Actually, if my other RSS feed is any indication, this might be a firefox issue (or that they changed it just enough that RSS feeds will need to be reformatted)

(I'm having similar issues with firefox, but because the erfworld feed I have is similarly laggy, I suspect it's not a localized issue)

[Roland St. Jude]

This is outside my bailiwick and so I don't have a substantive response for you, but I did want to say that I find it amusing that you created an account specifically for this called "LetMeAsk" and yet you didn't ask anything. Perhaps "LetMeDemand" would have been a better choice? :smalltongue:

[LetMeAsk]

Agreed.
When I re-think my quick one-time nickname selection, It should have been "LetMeReport"

[qvks]

I also created an account just to report this issue. Some technical info about the problem:

Most feed readers need some way to identify which items in a feed are new, and which ones have been seen before. They generally do that by caching part or all of each feed item they retrieve. Some readers cache items forever, while others only cache a limited number of items to prevent the cache from growing indefinitely-- this works because feeds generally only contain a limited number of recent items, commonly 10 or 20.

In my case, my feed reader caches the most recent 100 items (disclaimer: I wrote the program myself). This has been enough for every other RSS or Atom feed I've ever come across, except for OOTS. Every time my reader retrieves the OOTS feed, it marks all strips older than the most recent 100 strips (so ~750 of them currently!) as new. This is slow, and a pain to deal with.

Besides that, putting every strip ever in the RSS feed wastes a nontrivial amount of bandwidth (~165K per request currently, though If-Modified-Since mitigates that greatly). And then there are readers with performance problems, as in LetMeAsk's situation. Plus there's no benefit that I can see, since a person adding the OOTS feed for the first time has probably already read through the archives online anyway.

Anyway, I just want to make sure the person in charge of the OOTS RSS feed is aware of these issues. If this is not the right place to do that, whom should I notify?

[Rawhide]

The RSS feed will not be changing on the current version of the site. It's not worth the effort with our plans to eventually replace it.