Do the RSS
Phil Ringnalda has a nice post about update intervals in RSS feeds. After reading this, I’ve made the following changes in my RSS 2.0 feed:
<sy:updatePeriod>daily</sy:updatePeriod>
<sy:updateFrequency>6</sy:updateFrequency>
In English this means that my site is updated daily, but no more than six times per day, meaning an average of once every four hours. So if your aggregator checks my site, it knows this if it supports this feature. Of course, you can still force it to poll more often, but I’ve politely told it not to expect new content if you wait less than four hours between polls.
Also, I finally got Straw working. Now I have a nice aggregator in Linux as well. For Windows I’m using Feedreader.
There is a story on k5 about the problem with RSS feeds and polling intervals. Me being a mojo-whore, I wrote a comment listing a bunch of RSS aggregators for people to use.