Add redundancy to your website using FeedBurner
On the new version of Thunderbolt, there are three news feeds in the right column of several pages. We take news from other sites using RSS, then display it for users to read. However, there’s one problem; if you rely on other people to provide a service, then you can’t guarantee that it will always work.
This issue has appeared a couple of times on the site when the feed from GamePolitics.com went down. This caused the RSS parsing script on Thunderbolt to timeout, sending loading times through the roof. So what can we do about it? The solution is to cache (make a copy of) the RSS feed every so often and if we can’t find the original site, we just display the most recent version. You could do this in a couple of ways; cache the feed yourself or let someone else do it.
FeedBurner offers a free feed distribution and publishing service. Once they’ve ‘burnt’ your feed, you point your users to your feed on FeedBurner (who check and update their copy during the day). The main benefit is the bandwidth you save through offloading your RSS to FeedBurner, but what we’re interested in here is the ability to ‘burn’ any feed you like.
So here’s the cunning part; you set up a FeedBurner feed for the site you rely on – GamePolitics.com in this case – and then point your website to it. So if the other website crashes, you’re not affected because FeedBurner will keep running using a copy of the RSS.
Sending other websites’ feeds through FeedBurner first is a bit like sending your email through Gmail to filter spam. It’s free and keeps your site running smoothly no matter what happens to the website you’re taking the feed from.
About the author
Philip Morton is a user experience consultant at Foolproof in London. He's also the Editor of Thunderbolt, which he has been running since 2000.
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