Some major updates over the weekend on the subject RSS feed.
The link is now http://mt.rollingegg.net/881summit.xml. The old link still works, but now instead of sending out the feed it sends an “HTTP 302 FOUND” response, which redirects most web clients (i.e. your RSS reader) to go grab the file from the new location. It should send out an “HTTP 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY” response, but it seems that the only way to fully control the HTTP header to send out the right one is to rename the script to nph-881summit.py, which breaks the old link anyway. I suppose this would do for now.
The new script is run every six hours from a cron job. It grabs the index file (actually left.htm) from the source site, quits if the file is unchanged, grabs any new entries, renders the RSS for the new items and stuff into a simple database, then pulls all the items from the database and sends the full RSS file to standard output. In the cron job stdout is redirected to 881summit.xml in my web space.
Since this feed is now a static file, it saves all the trouble of grabbing all the data from the source site, and is therefore much faster than the previous one. As the source data does not change very often (more like ever few days), there really is no point to grab the source every time the feed is accessed. Six hours of lead (or lag) time is about right, keeping the feed file relatively up-to-date.
One slight problem is that the script doesn’t open the 881summit.xml file, and uses shell redirect instead, which messes up its last-modified time stamp. This will be changed shortly.
Update (9/2 10:55): The script no longer needs a shell redirect, and now writes directly to the 881summit.xml file. Project concluded.