news
Web Browsers/Web Servers: RSS, New Blogs, and Load Balancing
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The Verge ☛ Google says Polymarket bets showing up in News was an ‘error’
Google has already partnered with both Kalshi and Polymarket to bring their data to Google Finance. Whether that deal and the results in Google News are related in any way is unclear. We’ve reached out to Google for additional information.
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Stuart Breckenridge ☛ 'You Can Absolutely Have an RSS Dependent Website in 2026'
When I switched to Astro, I dropped my free membership, membership-only pages, and newsletter, effectively going RSS only. And Atom. And JSON feed. It can be done.
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Kev Quirk ☛ How I Discover New Blogs
If I ever want to spend some time reading, I'll usually open Miniflux over my Mastodon client, Moshidon. There's no likes, boosts, hashtags etc. just interesting people sharing interesting opinions.
It's lovely.
So how do I discover these blogs? There's many ways to do it, but here's some that I've found most successful, ranked from most useful, to least.
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University of Toronto ☛ Apache 2.4, ETag values, and (HTTP) response compression
Another thing that the web has is the ETag header. An ETag header is supposed to be a unique identifier for a specific version of a 'resource', ie a URL. The place I normally think of ETags being used is in conditional GETs, but it also has a lesser appreciated (by me) role in HTTP caching, and as I understand it, that creates a little problem.
An opportunistic cache is allowed to use the same ETag and If-None-Match headers for cache validation. When an ETag value is only used by the origin server for conditional GET, we generally would prefer that the ETag value not vary based on the compression. However, when an intermediate cache uses an ETag for validation, it's apparently more convenient if the ETag is specific to the compression. As a result, RFC 9110's specification for ETag specifically requires that the ETag vary based on the response compression, not just its contents.
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[Old] Sam Rose ☛ Load Balancing
Past a certain point, web applications outgrow a single server deployment. Companies either want to increase their availability, scalability, or both! To do this, they deploy their application across multiple servers with a load balancer in front to distribute incoming requests. Big companies may need thousands of servers running their web application to handle the load.
In this post we're going to focus on the ways that a single load balancer might distribute HTTP requests to a set of servers. We'll start from the bottom and work our way up to modern load balancing algorithms.