A few years ago you lets users set their own Refresh Feeds time. Is that still possible?
It’s not. I’m moving, one small step at a time, toward a system where NetNewsWire makes far fewer calls to fetch RSS feeds, since frequent calls becomes a hardship to people who run and pay for servers. (And they complain about it, as they should, and sometimes they even ban NetNewsWire.)
(Also: frequent calls uses more battery and energy, and we shouldn’t be wasting energy.)
But it’s not enough for it to make fewer calls: it should be smart about it. Figure out how often feeds update and when, that kind of thing.
It should also pay attention to what the server is saying about how long to cache feeds and which hours to skip, for instance.
2 Likes
In your latest release on NNW today has your original comment changed in this threat. In the features that were suppose to be added one mentioned “Lowered the minimum time between feed refreshes from 29 minutes to 9 minutes”. What changed?
I’m still trying to find a balance. We need RSS to be timely enough that it’s actually useful to people, and I need to not get constant support issues about timeliness of updates. So I lowered the minimum.
The other side of this coin though is that I need to make sure feed publishers have tools available to control polling frequency. Hence the support for cache-control. (And later I plan to add other tools.)
It’s on me to write this up and make it easy for feed publishers to know what they need to do to make NetNewsWire read less often (if they need that).
I don’t plan to change that setting (though I might later) because I don’t really want to encourage more-often feed updating. But I do want it to work better if you do a manual refresh.
One step at a time, in other words!
Thanks. I’ll let you get back to your work.