Re: Why not use the guid? (was Re: [syndication] Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched)

[Mark Fletcher <markf@wingedpig.com>]

Dave Winer wrote:

> They have a guid on each item -- why not use it?
>
> http://backend.userland.com/permalinksNewsAggregators
>  
Of course we use the guid. That's our index (along with the site id) 
into the database for each item. It's also how we can tell that a 
particular item has been changed or edited. So we have cases where there 
are new items, when the guid doesn't appear in the database, and cases 
where items have been edited, because we go in and compare different 
fields of the item with what we fetched last time. We highlight the item 
in either case.

So in this case, the guids were fine and we were able to fetch the 
previously-fetched items out of our database. We then compared the 
various parts of each item to our previously fetched info, like the 
description, title, and link. The links were different, so we considered 
the items to be updated, which we highlighted for our users.


Thanks,

Mark
--
Mark Fletcher
Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com