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With 25 feeds, a news aggregator is small enough to build in a weekend and awkward enough to keep misbehaving afterward. The three problems that cost the most time are usually not parsing. They are deciding how often to fetch, deciding what “complete” means when feeds only show a moving window, and deciding when two items are the same story. This article covers each one using the feed standards and Google’s published feed guidance. It draws on no personal build log, so nothing here is a claim about how any particular project went.
1. Fetch cadence and failure state
Polling frequency is a design choice, and nothing forces one number on you. The only hard reference point is Google’s Feedfetcher documentation, which says: “Feedfetcher shouldn’t retrieve feeds from most sites more than once every hour on average.” Google adds that frequently updated sites may be refreshed more often. That describes Google’s own service. It is not a universal rule for independent aggregators, but it is a reasonable benchmark for what publishers see as normal traffic.
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Google also notes that Feedfetcher ignores robots.txt because its requests are user initiated. Do not copy that behavior into a scheduled crawler. A background job that polls on its own schedule is not the same as a request a user triggered.
For 25 sources, the practical engineering questions are:
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- Per-source intervals. A wire-style site and a weekly newsletter should not share one timer. Store an interval per source.
- Last-successful-fetch state. Record when each source last returned a valid response, separately from when you last tried. Without that distinction, a broken feed looks identical to a quiet one.
- Failed requests. Decide in advance what a timeout, an error status or malformed XML does: retry, back off, or flag the source for review.
These are considerations, not measured results. The sources do not report failure rates for small aggregators.
2. Completeness: what the feed does not show you
A feed is usually a window onto recent items, not an archive. RFC 5005 (M. Nottingham, IETF Standards Track, September 2007) separates three kinds:
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| Feed type | How entries are presented | What it means for an aggregator |
|---|---|---|
| Complete | All entries in one document | The simplest case; the document is the whole logical feed |
| Paged | Entries split across temporary documents | Lossy: entries can change while you walk the pages |
| Archived | Entries in permanent, stable documents | Lets a client recover entries it missed |
The standard is blunt about paging: “Paged feeds are lossy; that is, it is not possible to guarantee that clients will be able to reconstruct the contents of the logical feed at a particular time.” It cautions consumers against presenting paged feeds as coherent or complete.
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Google’s feed guidance points the same way from the publisher side. It recommends that a feed retain updates since at least the previous download if the goal is to avoid missed updates. If your polling gap is longer than a source’s window, items fall out unseen, which is another reason to track fetch state per source.
3. Identity: duplicates, updates and timestamps
“Duplicate” covers two different problems, and they need different tools.
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Same entry seen twice
This is the easy one. RFC 5005 defines duplicate Atom entries in archived feeds as entries sharing the same atom:id, and says to treat the most recently updated duplicate, judged by atom:updated, as part of the logical feed. A sensible aggregator applies the same idea generally: key items on a stable identifier per source, and when you see the key again, update the stored record instead of inserting a new one. Where a feed supplies no usable identifier, fall back on the item URL.
Same story from different publishers
This is a different problem. Matching IDs says nothing about two outlets covering one event, and RFC 5005 does not address it. You need a separate story-matching approach, and it carries a trade-off: aggressive matching risks merging distinct stories, while cautious matching leaves visible repeats. A recent secondary guide (iTechGuides, September 2026) lists deduplication as a standard pipeline step, but it does not establish a best algorithm, and none of the sources here quantify accuracy. Decide which error you can tolerate and keep the original items retrievable either way.
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Timestamps and URLs that make both work
Google Search Central’s 2014 guidance, which is older and not a complete aggregator specification, recommends:
- Canonical URLs in feed items.
- RFC 3339 dates in Atom and RFC 822 dates in RSS.
- Not changing a modification time unless the content changed meaningfully.
That last point cuts both ways. A source that bumps timestamps on trivial edits will keep resurfacing old items if you sort or alert by update time. Consider storing the first-seen time separately and ordering by that.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.A normalized record to aim for
Different feeds supply different fields, so convert everything into one internal shape on ingest. This is a practical suggestion consistent with the guidance above, not something any source requires, and not every feed will fill every field.
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|---|---|
| Source ID | Which of the 25 feeds the item came from |
| Item identifier | Feed-supplied ID (such as atom:id) when present; used for same-entry deduplication |
| Canonical URL | Fallback key and link target |
| Title | Display and story matching |
| Published / updated time | Parsed into one format from RFC 3339 or RFC 822 inputs |
| First-seen time | Your own clock; stable ordering and gap detection |
The pipeline order the secondary guide describes fits this: controlled fetching, parsing, normalization, deduplication, then a searchable reading view. Treat that as one common implementation path, not a standard.
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