I'm creating a feed aggregator. I will be crawling blogs and checking sometimes every hour or every two hours to see if they have new posts. I am using Simplepie for this.
I want to know if I should change the custom user-agent that Simplepie has (SIMPLEPIE_USERAGENT). Also, what are best practices for user-agents if I should change it. Thanks!
Yes, you should, otherwise they might start complaining about it to the SimplePie maintainer (i.e. me :) ). Using a custom useragent lets them know who to contact if something breaks.
The ideal format is "Your Program Name/1.0" where 1.0 is the version. You can also include URLs (put a + in front of them if you do so) and contact addresses, making it "Your Program Name/1.0 (+http://example.com/)"