A few weeks ago, Rachel by the Bay made another update post regarding the RSS correctness system that she’s been running. In these posts, she’ll enumerate various feed readers and call out their behavior: for better or for worse. For the first time, Bloggulus made it onto the list without any noticeable issues!
To many, “seems fine” might feel like an underwhelming statement. But to me, it means everything. It feels good to know that Bloggulus properly respects caching headers, provides a distinct user agent, and polls at an acceptable rate. I’ve put a decent amount of effort into ensuring that Bloggulus follows the rules and is a respectful actor in the context of the greater internet.
This is software engineering: your are expected to know what you’re doing when writing programs that interact with other systems (especially those that you do not own). That being said, many feed readers don’t pass the test and display various issues (Bloggulus used to be one of them). I’m proud to have made things better.
Overall, it’s cool to have learned something from (and interacted loosely with) such a famous tech blogger. It really made my week!