Is this the proper usage of creating / using a transient?

Question

I'm new to using transients. Is this the proper format to create a transient and have it pull from the DB instead of using the http api?

I have standardized my snippet so others can double check their code as well...

function google_transient() {

    $url = 'http://www.google.com';
    $the_whole_body = wp_remote_retrieve_body( wp_remote_get($url) );

    $transient_name = 'google';

    // Get any existing copy of our transient data
    if ( false === ( $transient_name = get_transient( $transient_name ) ) ) {

        // It wasn't there, so regenerate the data and save the transient
         set_transient( $transient_name, $url, 60*24); // 24 hour cache          
    }

    return $the_whole_body;
}

Answer 1

No quite: Get the transient’s content first, then do the expensive work to fetch the external resource.

function google_transient() {
    $transient_name = 'google';
    $content        = get_transient( $transient_name );

    // done
    if ( $content )
        return $content;

    $url     = 'http://www.google.com';
    $content = wp_remote_retrieve_body( wp_remote_get($url) );

    set_transient( $transient_name, $content, DAY_IN_SECONDS ); // 24 hour cache          

    return $content;
}