Re: [syndication] Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched

[Jeremy Zawodny <jeremy@zawodny.com>]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 04:14:58PM -0700, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> 
> What we got around 2:10pm or so:
> http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/716/1b61ffe3d3e401f8a236c4e4727dcd70/*http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl
> =story2&u=/ap/20030826/ap_on_sc/shuttle_investigation
> 
> What we got at 2:45pm:
> http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/716/56c2218fb25259b13bf8066330154de1/*http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?t
> mpl=story2&u=/ap/20030826/ap_on_sc/shuttle_investigation
> 
> Again, we didn't see it between the last two fetches. Perhaps it was a 
> fluke.

Thanks for the sample.  We've tracked this down and the news guys will
be yanking the tracking URL stuff shortly.  It's the culprit.

> >>I don't mind the tracking aspect, but because the link changes,
> >>Bloglines considers each item as being updated every time we fetch
> >>one of the feeds. We track which items each user has read, and when
> >>an item is updated, we treat it as an unread item. So users end up
> >>seeing items they've already read, over and over.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Why not use the guid?
> >  
> >
> Use the guid as an index into the database for the item. But that 
> doesn't tell you if the item's been edited. So you have new items, and 
> updated items.

When an item is updated, the title will change and the pubDate will
change.  The url and guid will remain the same (after they yank the
tracking bit).

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny     |  Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo!
<Jeremy@Zawodny.com>  |  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/