Comments on: GUIDs and RSS

By: Adam Hill

Adam Hill — Mon, 10 Feb 2003 22:56:55 +0000

I would like both formats and allow me to choose either on a per feed basis.

Another idea — If the GUID is the same but a MD5 *hash* of the contents is different then add it to a reply of the original article.

Too weird ???

By: Adam Howitt

Adam Howitt — Sat, 08 Feb 2003 21:36:06 +0000

Personally I would like a revision manager style approach like if you turn on revision tracking in word using a markup system like [] in red indicates omitted text and [] in blue indicates new content. This would involve NewsGator inspecting the current and last post by GUID and generating a document with markup. The options tab could allow you to either select
1. delete previous posts with same guid
2. show revisions mark up or
3. update existing item and mark as unread

By: Bill Kearney

Bill Kearney — Sat, 08 Feb 2003 19:23:24 +0000

The GUID, as understood by Winer and implemented in Radio and pseudo-2.0, is a mess. It’s just not right.

The reason I’d suggested GUID in the first place was to allow the “finding” of an item inside and archive or other places. There’s plenty of value to having timestamps on items and to use them as a means to define the visibility of an item. Edits to an item change it and in most cases would invoke a new GUID on the item; ALONG with the new timestamp. They’re different and valuable for different reasons. One is to see if the item’s new. The other is to find the item. Each has it’s own merit. How current readers or feeds utilize this isn’t a good reason to continue doing it wrong.

By: Simon Fell > Its just code : Saturday, February 08, 2003

Simon Fell > Its just code : Saturday, February 08, 2003 — Sat, 08 Feb 2003 19:06:12 +0000

Pingback

By: Joe Friend

Joe Friend — Sat, 08 Feb 2003 07:31:32 +0000

I like the “snapshot in time” idea for the technorati feed.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 23:42:05 +0000

Hmm is right. :-) I see your point, David, and you’re right – it seems like a “last-modified” header would take care of things. Or perhaps the guid field is being mis-used by many of the current publishing tools. The problem we have now is, if I make a change to respect the guid (which seems like it’s potentially the right thing to do, given the current RSS spec), then we will break the other very common scenario. That would probably cause more harm overall.

Would it be possible to change the technorati feed to eliminate the inbound/outbound links for linking feeds, or having them be a snapshot in time of what the link count was at the time the incoming link was created? I’m not sure what information your customers consider most important; but if I were subscribing to your service, I would ideally like to see one new item for each link you detect, at the time you detect it. Hmm.

By: David Sifry

David Sifry — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 23:01:18 +0000

Hmmm. Joe posted about this on his blog, and I followed up. The problem isn’t just in the “Blog last updated xxx minutes ago” issue – even if I changed that to “Blog last updated on Jan 1, 2003 10:00:00″ you’d still be faced with changes in content, like what I describe here:

For example, what happens when the inbound linking blog’s link cosmos changes, and instead of saying:

26 inbound blogs, 52 inbound links

it says:

27 inbound blogs, 53 inbound links

or the like? That’s why I think there’s either a problem with NewsGator, or with RSS 2.0. IMHO, if a weblog is going to use a guid, then it should change the guid whenever the RSS content changes, IMHO.

What may be necessary is a change to the RSS 2.0 spec that has a “Last-modified:” header in it. That way, NewsGator and other aggregators can know when a post has updated content, and use the Last-modified field, otherwise fall back to the current kludge of hashing the title, link, and descriptions.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 22:02:38 +0000

Paul, I agree – the ideal is probably to update an existing item if it already exists, and mark it as unread. However it wouldn’t help in the technorati case, because every time you retrieve the RSS, every single post is different. So the entire feed would show up as unread every time you retrieve.

Joe, in regards to your comment about only update if the post date/time changes, the problem there is in many cases, the post date/time is not updated when people update their posts.

By: Samer Ibrahim

Samer Ibrahim — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 21:44:44 +0000

Personally I like option 2 so I’m with you. I’d like to know when things have been updated so I can go back and read them. I don’t want to miss out on some important piece of information.

By: Joe Friend

Joe Friend — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 21:24:40 +0000

Sorry about the double post. I have examples of the Technorati problem on my blog: http://joe.weblog.or.id/2003/02/07.html#a606