The RSS feeds haven’t changed much since introduction, so I’m glad to finally get an update out the door. Check out your RSS page and you will see it has changed a bit. There are some new feeds for “popular” stuff. The best part is that now ALL the feeds can be customized in terms of how far back in the past they pull their data. By default they all do the last 24 hours, but as is mentioned on the RSS page itself, you can change this value anywhere from 1 hour to 96 hours.
Why is this cool? Two reasons. One, for those of you with very low traffic sites, pulling the data from a larger time period will give you much more interesting results. Second, you can use any of the “popular” feeds with a low hour latency as a kind of “trend watcher”, for lack of a better term. For example, suppose you write an article and it appears on the digg home page. If you were using the “popular referer” feed with the hours set to just 1 or 2, any big changes regarding your incoming traffic would become immediately apparent, and you could react accordingly (if needed) or you could just smile with satisfaction knowing that yet another site is linking to you and you knew about it right away because Clicky rocks so hard. This is something that will be also implemented within the web site itself very soon, as many people have been requesting to see data from more than just one day.
Lastly, because we love you all so much (seriously – can you feel the love?), we have increased the amount of data returned from the feeds (up to 100 results instead of 30), and we have changed the RSS cache time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes. Most online readers update their feeds once per hour and no more, but if you are using a reader that lets you customize the update time, you will now be getting RSS updates twice as often.
