Slowing the RSS Tide

June 24, 2007 11:49 AM

Is it possible, via a intermediary website or some other method, to delay an RSS feed, causing posts to hit Google Reader and/or iTunes a chosen amount of hours/days after being published?
posted by boombot to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You could do this if you knew the useragents that the RSS crawler bots are using. You would have to add logic to the script that generates your feed, basically: if useragent == googlereaderbot or itunesbot, show latest entries starting from x days ago.
posted by subclub at 12:33 PM on June 24, 2007

subclub has the right idea. Another option; I wonder if feedburner offers a service like this? Check that out.

Also check out the RSS spec, some optional elements of interest that may help:

lastBuildDate The last time the content of the channel changed.

skipHours A hint for aggregators telling them which hours they can skip. More info here.

skipDays A hint for aggregators telling them which days they can skip. More info here.
posted by GregX3 at 12:52 PM on June 24, 2007

Your plan is only going to result in a backlog. A huge one. Perhaps there is an RSS reader out there with some clipping features so that you can maybe disinclude some subjects, but I haven't come across it yet. Alternatively, and this is the tack I've been taking recently, you can start culling your feeds and deleting some of them. RSS is an easy way to information overload and sometimes the only fix is to cut the flow.
posted by rhizome at 12:57 PM on June 24, 2007

rhizome: I think boombot is a publisher who wants his "real readers" to get content before it shows up in other places. At least that's how I interpreted it.
posted by subclub at 7:35 PM on June 24, 2007

Response by poster: No, I'm afraid it's more tragically obsessive compulsive than it. I'd like to delay the receipt of feed content.

For example, Podcast X is published on Saturday - I'd like to queue it at some intermediary until, say, Tuesday, then have the new information hit iTunes.
posted by boombot at 7:58 PM on June 24, 2007

So this is something you want to do to other people's feeds that you are consuming yourself?

I imagine that one of the web based feed aggregators (AKA "planet") could be hacked to do this pretty easily. It would probably be easiest to do with one that stores the imported data in a SQL database because then you'd just have to add a clause to the SQL that selects the posts.

Maybe Gregarius would be a good place to start.
posted by Good Brain at 10:43 PM on June 24, 2007

Best answer: This is actually really easy to do with Yahoo! Pipes. Here's an example using Lifehacker and only showing articles which are at least two days old. If you clone this one you could easily change it to whatever feed or time delay you wanted.
posted by closetpacifist at 10:44 AM on June 25, 2007

Response by poster: Hmmm, that looks like a great solution, closetpacifist.
posted by boombot at 3:24 PM on June 25, 2007