By which I mean: Google should act as a central repository of RSS feeds so that sites don’t have to get hammered by hungry aggregators. Intepid’s bandwidth stats were surprisingly high and growing this last few days, but actual visitor count was pretty much as expected. Puzzled, I checked the server logs, and saw that the culprit was about a gazillion RSS accesses, all from the same few IPs. *

Basically, if you subscribe to a site using a desktop aggregator [like SharpReader or Sauce Reader or a bunch of other programs] you’re probably going to be hitting that site every hour or so, and for the large sites [and the blogosphere in general] these hits are starting to account for a serious percentage of overall traffic. If Google offered an RSS caching service, then each site would only need to be accessed once every hour [or less?], and all the individual aggregators could just hit Google instead.

Web-based aggregators like Bloglines already do cache RSS feeds in the way I describe, and therefore cause no such problems for content providers. But this is not the only reason to use them; I’ve tried a couple of different desktop aggregators, and found them all kind of annoying, since they were usually bulky and felt too much like email clients with too many messages to read. Services like Bloglines make it all seem so much easier, and for some reason I worry less about trying to read every single new entry.

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* I am not actually telling the whole story here, in that the humungous numbers were in part because of an error in my RSS script, causing a feed to reference itself, which in turn caused what looks like an infinite loop in Sauce Reader v1.10. To give an example of what I’m talking about, the log shows 10,354 accesses [each one a full GET downloading the exact same 2609 bytes of data] from a single IP taking place over a period of just four hours. That’s about one visit every 1.4 seconds from just one user! I believe that I have since corrected the problem with the feed, so both myself and that user [yes you, the one using Sauce Reader ;)] may be consuming a lot less bandwidth in the future.

Some of these bricks explode!

I am up to chapter 6 of 15 in Half-Life 2, which I think demonstrates that I’m not much of a gamer since I’ve heard people say that you can play through the whole thing in about 10 hours. I seem to have spent that long just driving the stupid air-boat. Also I seem to get stuck a lot.

One puzzle was actually solved by my frustration with being stuck: I was wandering about clobbering everything with my crowbar, writing dot-matrix swear words on walls and objects, when I absent-mindedly hit something explosive… and when the smoke had cleared [and my hearing returned] the way forward was revealed.