Notes posted by superfeedr

RSS feeds in Rails

Fetching RSS feeds in the request/response cycle inside a Rails application is probably not the very best approach, as it will make your application as slow as the server serving RSS feeds. Another option is to do it asynchronously using a worker or a queue, but this can also become quite complex and hard to maintain over time.

Another solution is to use an API like superfeedr.com and its Rails Engine (http://blog.superfeedr.com/consuming-rss-feeds-rails/). All the polling and parsing is done on Superfeedr’s side and your application is notified in realtime as soon as the resources are updated using a webhook pattern.