Comments on: Molehill? http://atomicplayboy.net/blog/2003/02/20/molehill/ All hail the mushroom cloud Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:56:52 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Tomas http://atomicplayboy.net/blog/2003/02/20/molehill/comment-page-1/#comment-72 Tomas Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://atomicplayboy.net/blog/2003/02/20/molehill/#comment-72 For the (un?)lucky bloggers (or any other content provider), like Mark, to whom bandwith usage actually costs a significant amount of money it's justifiably a big problem. The *point* of RSS is a) to iterate posts in a standardized way and b) to *just* iterate the posts in the standardized way, not the images, not the stylesheets, not the javascripts, nothing but the posts. It's short for Rich Site Summary (depending on who you ask) and the keyword here is *summary*. Also, I don't know about you but some of us don't read *all* the posts which the RSS-reader aggregates, some posts just seem uninteresting and we ignore those. Thus, not all posts aggregated are page-download equivalents. Furthermore, browsers cache separate files like images (and sometimes CSS and JavaScripts too), does NewsMonster and other RSS readers? In conclusion, I think NewsMonster, and all other RSS readers, are robots and therefore should respect robots.txt. It goes without saying that it should use a distinct user-agent string and not identify itself as a popular browser.. For the (un?)lucky bloggers (or any other content provider), like Mark, to whom bandwith usage actually costs a significant amount of money it’s justifiably a big problem.

The point of RSS is a) to iterate posts in a standardized way and b) to just iterate the posts in the standardized way, not the images, not the stylesheets, not the javascripts, nothing but the posts. It’s short for Rich Site Summary (depending on who you ask) and the keyword here is summary.

Also, I don’t know about you but some of us don’t read all the posts which the RSS-reader aggregates, some posts just seem uninteresting and we ignore those. Thus, not all posts aggregated are page-download equivalents. Furthermore, browsers cache separate files like images (and sometimes CSS and JavaScripts too), does NewsMonster and other RSS readers?

In conclusion, I think NewsMonster, and all other RSS readers, are robots and therefore should respect robots.txt. It goes without saying that it should use a distinct user-agent string and not identify itself as a popular browser..

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