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> AggregatorAuthors

Technorati has a number of different mechanisms for discovering weblogs and updating its database. By far the most useful is the changes.xml format popularized at [WWW]Weblogs.com There are problems with the simple changes.xml file, however - it is time-inflexible, meaning that it only shows the weblogs that were updated in the last 3 hours. This is fine for most purposes, but sometimes this is too much data (all I need is the last x minutes, for example) and sometimes it is too little data (network failure at one end caused a spidering gap), so my suggestion for weblog aggregator authors is to make the changes.xml file generation dynamic, in the following format:

What would be best would be to have an HTTP-GET interface to changes.xml so that I could ask for the updated weblogs in the last "n" seconds. The URL might look like:

http://ping.foo.com/changes.xml?last=900

Would return the most recently updated weblogs in the last 15 minutes, for example.

Also, it would be ideal if you used either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1