Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2024-08)

Updated 2024-09-05.

Tech updates: RSS lastBuildDate, crashes, NTP.

Still getting ready to upgrade the RPi server, easy does it... Mainly this month was a lot of time away, at a music festival, then a research summer school, then a long weekend, ... and some heat-pump 3D jigsaw stuff!

2024-08-10: NTP Traffic Reducing

NTP traffic seems (from casual inspection with tcpdump) to have slowed to about 1 request per second.

2024-08-08: RSS lastBuildDate

I have modified the podcast RSS feed lastBuildDate to reflect the timestamp of the newest primary media file (eg .mp3) in the feed, after filtering for the 'lite' version.

The lastBuildDate was previously the latest timestamp of any of the podcast episode HTML source files, with no 'lite' filtering. As I touch the HTML quite often for minor edits, that kept the timestamp newer than needed for pulling new entries, though might help keen metadata updates. For both normal and 'lite' feeds the date was 2024-07-31.

Now the lite feed has a lastBuildDate of 2024-06-28, and the full-fat feed 2024-07-01.

That should result in the RSS feed files themselves being updated much less frequently, and also may help feed readers realise when a feed is quiet. Reports suggest that after a month or more of no changes some clients poll much less frequently. Both feeds are now 'quiet' by that metric for lastBuildDate, though with new file timestamps.

Crash!

The (sencha) server crashed, corrupting svn's client-side database for EOU, which required a messy many-hour recovery. And a bunch more crashes caused probably by the intense storage activity, and a little data loss from all the crashing.

Time to pull my finger out and bring up this new RPi3...