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 […]

The Anatomy of Syndication Beyond Third-Party Parsers Web feeds remain useful because they provide a direct, machine-readable pipeline from a publisher to an ingestion system. An aggregator can poll a source, retrieve a bounded XML document, extract newly published entries, and pass normalized records to a search index, event bus, warehouse, or notification service. That […]