B10[m|g]

A little less than a year ago, I created a simple scraper for the Fokke en Sukke cartoon website. It would spit out a RSS feed that I could include in my bloglines. Yay, so far so good.

Slowly but steadily I noticed more users until a certain MS Vista widget start querying it every 20 minutes (for no reason, for there aren't that many updates). At first I had no clue what was going on. Huge amounts of IP addresses started querying the feed, all with a cryptic "x-gadget:///gadget.htm" HTTP_REFERER.

After some searching, I found the author of the widget and asked him to please lower the rate of querying, for my poor old home server was not used to the stress put on him. Luckily he promised to patch it soon.

Then I figured: why not have Yahoo! host it? So I've hooked up a terrible simple pipe that seems to handle the load well.

Stats:
Published on 01/02/08
113572 runs

Taken that it's only 01/06/08 now, I may assume that it gets requested around 28393 times a day. Thanks for taking away the pain, Yahoo! :-)

yahoo pipes, fokke & sukke, fokke, sukke, rss, cartoon