The Illusion of Reliable Feed Identifiers at High Scale Feed ingestion systems are often designed around a seemingly simple assumption: an RSS guid, Atom id, or publisher-supplied item identifier represents one permanent piece of content. That assumption works until the system encounters a large syndication network, multiple CMS platforms, aggressive caching, or a publisher migration. […]

The Fragility of Timestamps in Distributed Content Feeds Datetime fields look simple until a feed ingestion service encounters the real world. RSS and Atom publishers frequently emit values that are technically incomplete, historically inconsistent, or ambiguous across time zones. A feed may contain an RFC-compatible date in one item, an ISO-like string without an offset […]

The Scale Bottleneck in Modern Feed Ingestion Polling a handful of RSS or Atom feeds at a fixed interval is straightforward. Polling tens of thousands is a different systems problem. A naive scheduler may issue requests every 15 or 30 minutes regardless of whether a publisher has changed anything. At scale, that creates a steady […]