What Are the Benefits of Cron Job for RSS?
The Unix and Linux operating systems have a program called cron that enables certain tasks to be scheduled. A scheduled task is often called a cron job. There are several benefits to using cron jobs to interact with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. RSS feeds contain up-to-date content on Web pages. An RSS feed reader periodically checks the RSS feeds and updates them if necessary. Because of the periodic nature of RSS publications, the automation capabilities of "cron" are good for a number of reasons.
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Periodically Check RSS Feed
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A cron job can periodically check an RSS feed for changes. This allows the cron job to act as a simple feed reader. A cron job can check a list of RSS feeds every half-hour (or any appropriate interval) to see if any of the feeds have been updated. If a feed has been updated, the cron job can replace the outdated information with up-to-date information.
Notifications
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Cron jobs allow Unix commands to be invoked periodically. You could use this to set up an email notification system that alerts you whenever a feed is updated. A better use would be to email whenever there is an error in the RSS feed. For example, if the author of an RSS feed changes his feed's address, the cron job will look for the feed at the old address and find nothing there. An email can then be dispatched and a systems administrator can look into the problem, discover that the RSS feed address changed, and correct the error.
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Automation
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Cron jobs can also be used to automate the process of publishing RSS feeds. A content publisher may finish all of his content by noon, but suppose he or she doesn't want it to be published until the stroke of midnight every day. A cron job can be set up by the publisher to accomplish this.
Cache File Cleaning
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A cron job can periodically clean out all of the expired Extensible Markup Files (XML) that are downloaded by feed readers. This is useful if you subscribe to many RSS feeds and your feed reader doesn't clean the cache itself. Any XML file that has an updated version can be flagged for removala and then deleted during the cron job.
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