Implementing time by expanding space in Web 2.0

Do not adjust your set. You have not stumbled into a science fiction or theoretical physics article, as the title might perhaps suggest. The topic of this article is - would you believe - URLs. URLs and time. URLs and space...Actually, the topic is really web 2.0.

Picture the scene. You have a website on which you publish stuff. The nature of the stuff doesn't really matter. The important thing is that there is stuff you want to publish today and there will be other stuff you want to publish tomorrow and the day after that...

Picture the scene. You have clients for your website that wish to consume your stuff. They want to consume the stuff you publish today. Tomorrow they will want to publish the stuff you publish tomorrow. Same for the day after...

Picture the scene. Your clients do not want to miss anything. They want it all. If they have something else to do for a while they want to go away and do it; return to your website and consume everything that happened when they were away. They do not want to miss anything. No gaps...

Picture the scene. Your clients tell you that they cannot take responsibility for polling adequately often to receive everything. Your boss tells you that you cannot afford the expense and infrastructure and all-round grief associated with running a full-on asynchronous messaging system with queues dedicated to storing the "feeds" for each client.

Picture the scene. You are pulling your hair out looking for a simple solution...What to do?

The essence of the problem is time. Time has a nasty habit of moving inexorably forward. It is as if time is a dimension we need to add into some websites so that as time "expands" forward, the website expands with it. Today's information goes up today. Tomorrow's information goes up tomorrow and overwrites the information from today...Hmmm....

Picture the scene. You set up a naming convention on your website that includes YYYY/MM/DD/HH/MM in your URLs. Every time you write to your website you always add but never overwrite anything. Your website just gets bigger and bigger. It expands as time expands. Now, if your clients need to go away for a few days but come back and pick up everything they missed in the interim, it is all up there. In a tidy series of date/time stamped "folders". No need to worry about RSS/Atom feeds that only hold a finite amount of history. No need for clients to poll frantically...

A simple but extremely effective approach to avoiding data exchange loss by trading time off against space. It is not a solution in all cases by any means but it is applicable in more scenarios than you might initially think.

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