sklar.com

...composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries...

© 1994-2017. David Sklar. All rights reserved.

Blogs as Newsgroups

I’ve had this blog for a few weeks and in the same time period, I’ve been experimenting with some RSS aggregators. This means that every hour, my computer makes a request to ten or twelve servers to get RSS feeds and lots and lots of computers make requests constantly to my web server for my RSS feed.



This strikes me as wasteful and inefficient. What if, instead, a blog’s RSS feed was treated like a newsgroup and hierarchically distributed? An ISP or a company or the same kinds of folks that run NNTP servers could run RSS servers which would periodically grab RSS files from individual blogs (or other upstream servers) and then pass on the changes to downstream servers and readers.



Blog URLs are easily turned into general-to-specific names for organization in this newsgroup-like world. Just invert the components of the hostname in the URL and keep the pathname as is: www.sklar.com/blog becomes com.sklar.www/blog. (Which I wish is how URLs were organized to begin with, but that’s another story.)



Even better, instead of individual blog/NNTP servers getting the RSS file from a blog, the blog can upload it to a server or a set of servers to get the process rolling. I know there are some ping services now that monitor changes, so that’s a step in the right direction.

Tagged with blog