A distributed platform for archiving and retrieving RSS feeds

A typical user has a collection of Web sites she often visits to get information, but keeping track of "what\´s new" on these Web sites is a nontrivial task. As the contents of the Web sites change frequently, the user would conceivably refresh or reload the Web pages to recollect the information to see if anything is new. To make this keep-up-to-date task easier, many Web sites provide what are called RSS feeds, which are descriptions of the new data in XML format. Some RSS readers have been developed in the past several years, but they are not able to retrieve information that was updated during the time period when the reader is offline. In this paper, we present a distributed platform that can archive, retrieve, and synchronize RSS feeds for the updated information through a network of servers.