Drip Update Technology

by Vikas Kamat
First Online: July 01, 2006
Page Last Updated: November 16, 2024

What is Drip Update?

What if you have a swimming pool? but no pump to fill it with water?

An easy and inexpensive solution to this problem is to drag the garden hose and let it fill.  It might take a very long time, but sure beats having an empty pool.

The "Drip Update" technology we developed for our classic low-technology website is inspired from this idea. Kamat's Potpourri is never updated suddenly, instead it is updated page-by-page, one page at a time.

I know, this technique might becoming obsolete now (year 2006) with the wide-spread use of broadband services. But in 1995 (that's when we started Kamat's Potpourri, see our chronology) we didn't have that luxury.

We still use drip-update on all of our statically rendered pages, and here I list many of the advantages that I have discovered about our accidental techonology.

Advantages of Drip Update Technology

• Drip-update is very inexpensive. You can update even a large website using dial-up. Think about that for a minute -- we have tens of thousands of pages, but eventually they all get updated, without any burden on me to update.

• The advertisers absolutely LOVE that our website is incrementally updated. It appears natural and looks like task undertaken by a human. This scores lots of points with search engines.

• The advertisers also love it for another reason. If a customer forgets to pay a renewal, their campaign is still active for a few days (till the next drip-update takes it down). It gives them extra time to arrange for payments or gives extra days if they decide to cancel.

• Because there is no instant-update, The drip-update forces us to think ahead and expose the pages to search engines before they are live. I have learnt that this is a very valuable benefit. By the time it is live, Google and Yahoo have had time to index it, and figure out its relevance and context.