Blogtrottr periodically fetches RSS and Atom feeds so that subscribers receive updates promptly. We try to be a good citizen and keep the load on your servers as low as possible.
Conditional requests
The robot tracks ETag and Last-Modified headers and sends them back on subsequent requests as
conditional requests.
If nothing has changed, your server can respond with 304 Not Modified and skip sending the feed body entirely.
WebSub
If your feed advertises a WebSub hub, the robot will subscribe to it and receive push notifications when new content is published. This means we can poll much less frequently, which is better for everyone.
TTL
If your RSS feed includes a <ttl> element, we'll use it to set our polling interval.
Values between 5 and 720 minutes are supported; anything higher is capped at 720.
Request signing
Feed fetches are signed using Web Bot Auth,
built on HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421).
Each request carries a Signature-Agent, Signature-Input and Signature header,
signed with an Ed25519 key, so hosts can verify the request genuinely came from Blogtrottr.
Our public key is published at
/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory
for verification.
Technical details
User-agent: Blogtrottr/2.1 (+https://blogtrottr.com/robot)