Updating your Feeds

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1 Introduction

[edit] Introduction

The act of updating your feeds (clicking Refresh) makes Gregarius fetch the latest version of the RSS/RDF/Atom feed from the remote servers and add new items to the database, marking them as unread.

There are three distinct ways to update your feeds. By default the HTTP Push method is used, if the browser supports it. Failing that it will fall back to the AJAX method. Setting the rss.config.serverpush configuration variable to false forces Gregarius to use the AJAX method directly.

Regardless of the used method, if new items are found during the update process they will be added to the database and all your previously unread feeds will be marked as read. If you would like to prevent this, you can set the rss.config.markreadonupdate configuration variable to 'false'.

[edit] Updating using HTTP Push

The HTTP Push update mechanism is probably the safest way to go, as it is much nicer to the web server: feeds are sequentially updated and Gregarius prints out the result of each update process, before it starts fetching the next feed.

Note: currently this method is only supported by Gecko-based browsers (e.g. Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape) and Opera.

[edit] Updating using AJAX

The AJAX update mechanism first renders the complete update page, then queries the server repeatedly for each feed it should update. You need to set rss.config.serverpush to false. In version 0.5.3+ you can set the number of feeds to fetch in parallel and the number of feeds in each batch.

This has a bigger performance footprint on your web server.

[edit] The rss.config.refreshafter setting

By default, Gregarius will fetch new feeds after 45 minutes of inactivity (if you have the browser open and Gregarius loaded). You can change the rss.config.refreshafter configuration variable to anything else (its set in minutes), but to avoid getting blocked, and to reduce the load on servers all round, don't make this less than 30. Setting it to zero disables automatic updates altogether.

[edit] Updating in the Background (using Cron) [Preferred Method]

The "silent" update mechanism doesn't print any output to the browser window while the update process is being performed. This is useful when you want to update your feeds from a cron job, for example. See Updating feeds with cron for details on how this is achieved.

[edit] Updating in the background (without using cron)

If you are unable to use a cron job, you need to get another computer to regularly call your update script. These are some external links that will do it for you.