How many entries in a feed?
While whipping up the extra RSS feeds, I encountered a fairly basic question: what's a normal amount of entries to include in a feed? While I have no problem with breaking social norms, if it's just as easy there's no point in bucking the trend... but unfortunately Google is giving me no love here.
It seems to be kind of hard to guesstimate an optimal number without having any statistics on the average time most people go between checking feeds. If your feed has 10 entries, and the average length between checks for most is three days, if you post once a day you're probably fine. If you post 5 times a day, people could start missing things.
You could go by file size, and take the average size of your posts and estimate how many you can keep in a feed of a certain size... but that seems a little goofy if it's an excerpt feed where you could pack 30 items in not that much more space than 10. When I look at the feeds I pull down from others, they seem to be all over the map. So, if you could, help me out and tell me what's in your feed, and perhaps Google will provide the love for another some day.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 22, 2005, at 01:02 PM
Comments (13)
Posted by: Cap'n Hector at January 22, 2005 01:24 PM
10 to 15, I'd say.
Posted by: Grubendol at January 22, 2005 01:52 PM
More the merrier? Usually I check every other day, but sometimes it can be a week if I am busy or traveling. Can it hurt anything to have 20 to 30+ can it?
Posted by: Jay Tuley at January 22, 2005 02:09 PM
If your making your own RSS feed, why not base it on time and number of entries, such as always have at least X amount of articles or all articles in a period of X days which ever is more.
Posted by: superfunkomatic at January 22, 2005 04:52 PM
i think you should post when you have something relevant to say, and worry not about the number of posts. you seem to be hot and cold on posts which is fine, a flurry then a break.
i think a lot of users now have 20-50 rss feeds almost at the point where you can read all of the rss content let alone anything longer than a few posts - unless of course they don't have a job and are occupying time :)
Posted by: Phil at January 22, 2005 06:56 PM
I'd go for the 15 mark... with full body :P
Posted by: drunkenbatman at January 22, 2005 09:32 PM
Superfunkomatic, we have a small misunderstanding. :) I meant how many entries to actually include in the feed? IE, you can build a feed that only has 5 feeds in it, or 3, or 10, or 50... IE, its what you see when you first download someone's feed for the first time. If a feed only has 5 entries saved, and you post 5 times a day, if someone doesn't check you every day they'll miss things.
And yea, I get it, people want full body. ;)
Posted by: Twist at January 22, 2005 10:14 PM
Blogger appears to limit you to 5 but I would rather have a higher number than that. 10 to 20 sounds good to me especially considering how often you update your blog. Of course I don't use RSS anyway so I guess it doesn't matter.
Posted by: vastheman at January 23, 2005 01:28 AM
The Register has 15 items in all their news feeds. It's OK, I guess. Yeah, 15 sounds good.
Posted by: vastheman at January 23, 2005 01:29 AM
The Register has 15 items in all their news feeds. It's OK, I guess. Yeah, 15 sounds good.
Posted by: vastheman at January 23, 2005 01:31 AM
The Register has 15 items in all their news feeds. It's OK, I guess. Yeah, 15 sounds good.
Posted by: Rory at January 23, 2005 08:24 AM
From my experience a typical feed has anywhere from 20 to 40 entries. If you plan on including the full body of each post in your entries you'll probably want no more than 10 - 20 entries to save on bandwidth.
Posted by: ssp at January 23, 2005 09:34 AM
Of course depends on what your main focus is, in particular whether bandwidth is an issue or not. But as a matter of principle I think that having a fixed number of posts is an unnatural idea precisely for the 'variable post density' reasons you mention.
It seems much more natural to me to have all posts from a fixed time span in the feed (and, with statically generated feeds you don't even have to worry about your feed being empty at some stage) To me, a good time span seems to be 8 days as it'll also serve people well, who only check their feeds once a week.
10 with full body