Caching Aggregated News Feeds

Did some work on becontrary.com today. The front page was a little dull and had a bounce rate of 49.8% according to Google Analytics, which means that almost half of the visitors that land there don't go any further. Previously the front page just displayed a news feed and some recent arguments and comments, I change it so that the feed in the main column aggregates the content from the debates so that in addition to news, it also displays new debate topics and arguments. The result is that it the front page should contain much more interesting content that will tempt visitors to explore the site.

I also made the BeContrary aggregated content available as an RSS feed, which makes it very easy for me to keep an eye on activity in the site. Hopefully it should be entertaining for visitors as well. Turbogears makes it laughably simple to add news feeds with the FeedController class. You simply derive from it and supply a method that returns the feed content. The controller does the work of producing the XML and serving it with CherryPy.

Because the changes would increase database access, I wrote a caching decorator for methods that return site content which doesn't need to update very often. If the decorated method is called within a definable period of time, the decorator returns a cached copy of the return value rather than building it again. Using this decorator I was able to reduce the database calls for the front page to zero for most requests (it updates every half an hour). This should come in handy if I get Slashdotted, Reddited or Dugg. Come to think of it, I could use the cache decorator on most of the site content. Even if the cache time was set to one minute it would be worthwhile for serious traffic. If I were to get 10 requests in a minute, it would reduce database access to one tenth! I'll probably blog the decorator at some point.

I seem to be finding a lot of time for my blog and hobby projects lately, because my TV broke! Rest in peace, my widescreen friend.