RE: [RSS-DEV] RE: [syndication] Master RSS List, Merging, and Updating...

[Morbus Iff <morbus@disobey.com>]

>>  - besides numbering, the unique id has no purpose.
>
>Actually, the unique id is the only piece of info about the site that
>never changes. From the user's point of view, the fact that a site
>gets a new URL, or is syndicated in a new format is irrelevant. By
>indexing off of the unique id I can give my users a long-term stable
>view of the sites that they read.

Let me play devil's advocate - only on a minor scale though, because I 
think it's a valid point. RSS feeds is kinda where the Web was years and 
years ago. There aren't that many sites, so it's good and handy for us to 
be editors of the content, and assign id's and help out the stupid authors 
who don't know how to do things right.

Very college Yahoo. But does it scale?

If RSS can be done by every single site on the net, then it'd be insane 
that we assign each site/feed a unique id. It'd be insane for us to be the 
mother hen of all the RSS feeds that could number in the millions. We 
should start looking for venture capital now.

Perhaps we need to launch a dmoz like service?

>> - if we can assure getting rid of duplicates, and 404's,
>>   then wouldn't the xmlUrl be the unique id, ie, if a
>>   channel changes a url, then the old xmlUrl would 404
>>   and be removed...
>
>No, because there is nothing to relate one to the other.

Is it our job to do that relation? Does Yahoo know that 
totalnetnh.net/~morbus used to be the home of disobey.com years and years 
ago? Or does it just know that /~morbus doesn't exist anymore? Hell, I 
didn't know about server side redirects years and years ago, so I didn't 
even have the happy net user knowledge to issue a perm redirect.

Again, does our current purpose scale well? Can we editorialize one million 
rss feeds, checking for all possible aliases, defects, user idiocies, and 
so forth, while still giving ourselves time to read the damn feeds that 
we're programming software for?

>> - We go with a unique id system. A channel dies. Instead
>>   of removing the channel, it has to be put in a pending
>>   area so we don't lose the unique id number. The
>>   author contacts us with the new xmlUrl*. We now
>>   have to hunt down the unique id, and change the xmlUrl.
>>   To make sure the rest of the junk is up to date, a script
>>   downloads xmlUrl and reassign title/description, etc.
>
>I do not think we can count on the authors to (with all due respect)
>know anything. It should be up to us to keep the list clean.

I'm not sure I follow your response for this blurb.
Hurry back from the airport, eh?


Morbus Iff
.sig on other machine.
http://www.disobey.com/
http://www.gamegrene.com/