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Building a news aggregator from 25 sources can involve more than connecting feeds: refresh policy, incomplete feed history, and duplicate or changing stories all affect what readers see. The sources available here support these as practical engineering challenges, but they do not establish which three issues cost the author time on a particular project. This article therefore explains the challenges without inventing first-person experience.
1. Choosing when to fetch each feed
Polling too frequently can waste requests; polling too slowly can make a reading view feel stale. A useful starting point is to give each source a refresh interval and record the time of its last successful fetch. Treat that interval as a policy to tune—not as a universal rule.
Google’s guidance applies specifically to Feedfetcher, Google’s service for retrieving feeds on behalf of users: it says Feedfetcher should not retrieve feeds from most sites more than once an hour on average, while frequently updated sites may be refreshed more often. That is not a blanket limit for every independently built aggregator. Google’s Feedfetcher documentation also notes that Feedfetcher ignores robots.txt because its requests are user initiated.
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2. Knowing whether a feed preserves the stories you need
A feed is not necessarily a complete archive. RFC 5005 distinguishes complete feeds, which present entries together, from paged feeds, which split entries across temporary documents, and archived feeds, which use permanent documents. Paged feeds can lose entries while a client moves between pages, because the contents may change during retrieval. The standard warns: “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.”
That matters if your aggregator promises a dependable history. A feed that exposes only a moving window may stop showing older entries; fetching it later cannot recover items that have already disappeared. Keeping fetched entries in your own storage can preserve what the aggregator has seen, but it cannot restore items the feed never exposed. RFC 5005 describes the feed models and their limitations; it does not specify how long an application should retain its own copy. Read RFC 5005.
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Be precise in the interface about the difference between “stories currently available from this source” and “all stories published by this source.” A stored local history can improve continuity, but it should not imply completeness beyond what the source feed guarantees.
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Two records can refer to the same item, or a source can publish a revised version of an item. Those are related but distinct cases: deduplication should avoid showing the same entry repeatedly, while update handling should preserve meaningful changes rather than treating every revision as a new story.
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Use stable identifiers when the feed provides them
For Atom entries in archived feeds, RFC 5005 identifies duplicates by a shared atom:id and says consumers should use the most recently updated duplicate as part of the logical feed. The update time is provided by atom:updated. This rule applies to that feed context; it does not solve cross-publisher matching when different outlets cover the same event under different identifiers.
Normalize dates and URLs without assuming every source is uniform
Google Search Central recommends canonical URLs and correctly formatted modification dates in feeds: RFC 3339 dates for Atom and RFC 822 dates for RSS. It also advises not changing a modification time unless the content changed meaningfully, and recommends retaining updates since at least the previous Google download when the aim is to avoid missed updates. This is Google’s guidance for feeds, not a complete specification for every aggregator. Google’s RSS and Atom feed guidance dates from 2014.
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A practical normalized record can retain the source identity, item URL, title, publication or update time, and a stable feed or item identifier when available. Keeping the original values alongside normalized ones makes it easier to diagnose missing or inconsistent metadata. Not every feed will supply every field, and none of these recommendations establishes a universal way to identify the same story across publishers.
How the pieces fit together
A typical ingestion pipeline fetches feeds, parses their entries, normalizes metadata, handles duplicate entries and updates, and then presents a searchable reading view. That sequence is implementation advice rather than a standard, and the exact design depends on whether the priority is freshness, history, or avoiding mistaken merges. An iTechGuides overview of news-aggregator architecture describes a similar high-level flow.
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- Choose refresh intervals deliberately and distinguish failed fetches from successful ones.
- Know whether each source offers a complete, paged, or archived feed before implying that your collection is comprehensive.
- Use feed identifiers and update timestamps when available, but treat matching the same story across publishers as a separate problem.
- Preserve source metadata so inconsistent dates, URLs, or identifiers can be investigated rather than silently discarded.
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