Slashdot is pretty lame for banning an IP if it checks the feed more than once every 30 minutes. This is what caching is for; maybe they don’t know how to implement it properly.

As for my future project, I’m not spending much time at all talking about it. I’m not aware of any open source feed aggregator projects, but then again, I haven’t really looked much either. One of the reasons why I’d rather just do my own is that I enjoy doing it myself, for the learning and experience, and the satisfaction of having it work exactly the way I want it to. It will take a while to do, once I even start on it, but that doesn’t matter too much to me, since I haven’t promised that I’d have it done by any certain date.

How frequently will Rojo update? (top)
Rojo updates most feeds on an hourly basis, checking to see which of your feeds have been updated or changed, and then adding the new stories into your categories.

I’ll look for it.

You’re spending more time talking about this vaporware rather then doing it. Why don’t you just work on an existing opensource project?

This is one reason why I am still planning to do my own aggregator, because then I will be able to control at a per-feed level how often I want it to be checked.

They parse feeds that are updated more frequently more and so on. They also most likely set the 30 minute minimum check because they don’t want to be blocked by some of the larger sites that block for checking more then once every thirty minutes.