About Wildlife Photographic Blog

Easy as Pie

WPB is built using the SimplePie RSS aggregator. This is an excellent tool for republishing individual RSS feeds or aggregating small numbers of feeds together. As the number of feeds grows, however, page load speeds begin to suffer.

To address this WPB has both an offline and an online component.

Offline

WPB uses a scheduled offline process to cycle through all the active feeds. This calls SimplePie to pull in the feed. Any new entries are saved to a database and local image thumbnails are created. Periodically it also deletes unused entries and images.

Online

When you visit the site WPB serves each post directly from the database, retrieving the images from its local cache. This is an order of magnitude faster than building the feed on the fly, but it does mean that new postings do not appear immediately.