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Yes that's right. Most blogs that are popular enough to have this problem send you the last 10 post titles and links or something. THAT is why people refresh every hour, so they don't miss out.

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I hate RSS feeds that don't include full content.

If only there were some kind of HTTP headers that could help them stop doing a GET every hour!

Gosh darn, if only I could say "Hey, please only send me the data if it's been modified since I last requested it an hour ago" somehow.

Sure, but whining to the broader public about it before talking to the engineers who made the offending software seems like a bad idea. The public doesn't really care and will keep using their preferred readers. In all my years on the Internet (a lot) I have never seen anyone complain about the volume of RSS traffic they got. If Rachel enjoys sharing her experience of investigating this issue, that's fine. But if she is sharing it with the expectation that her readers will randomly go fix other people's software, that's becoming unreasonable.

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