0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

GUIDs in RSS rock

Guids sure have a funny name, but they're quite useful. If your weblog tool supports them, use them. If not, ask the developer to add the support. It's not very hard.

Further, I strongly believe that all aggregators and readers should pay attention to guids where they are available. It's a convenience that many users will appreciate, especially people who are in a hurry
Source:Guids are not just for geeks anymore ;->


Haven't really been saying much lately about the recent plunge, albeit more amiable this time, back into the RSS and weblog syndication frey. Mostly because I haven't had the time, and mostly because people more eloquent than I were already saying what I thought.



In the meantime, I've been working, and puttering around with my own aggregator as spare time comes up. And you know, I'm tired of having to come up with some mechanism to detect new entries. This GUID thing is what I need. I don't want to run MD5 on another RSS item, and I don't care to track the minor edits people do on their entries, like Dave said.



Personally, I think the GUID should be the permalink, if at all possible. I used to think that that was what the link of an RSS item should be, but then I never really maintained a weblog in the quote-link-comment style for long stretches. My entries aren't usually completely about someone else's article. But, some weblogs are like that. So, link points to a subject under comment, GUID identifies the entry and ideally does it via permalink.



Nifty.

shortname=guids_in_rss_rock

Archived Comments

  • Rui Carmo
    MD5-to-GUID is also my basic approach to any kind of "data tagging" these days (on both PHP and Perl). It just saves so much time, even though it can look a little wierd when the GUIDs are visible. The thing about permalinks is that some people like them readable and meaningful - but hey, you do the coding, you make the choices. :) BTW, I'm curious about your RSS stuff, since I've just dropped in after jotting down some thoughts on Bayesian filtering over at http://mac.against.org/time/mac.2003-06-26 (please forgive the CSS and layout bugs, I'm redecorating). I'd kill for Bayesian categorization in Mail.app and a matching RSS reader, so if you can find the time, let us know more about it :)
  • Julian Bond
    Puzzled by your last para. "Personally, I think the GUID should be the permalink, if at all possible. I used to think that that was what the link of an RSS item should be, but then I never really maintained a weblog in the quote-link-comment style for long stretches." Are you sure you've got that the right way round? I also agree that the link should be the permalink is at all possible, and I prefer that to link being the URL of some external article mentioned in the text of description. And that's *because* not all weblog entries are "quote-link-comment".
  • l.m.orchard
    Julian: Hmm, maybe that does need some clarification: I do actually think that the "link" should be a link to which the entry refers, for the case of q-l-c-style entries. I say this because there exist weblog entries in this style, a point that Dave Winer has reiterated many times and that I just understood recently. So, what I say is this: Use the GUID to identify at your entry, in all cases, preferrably by permalink. Only use the link tag if your entry happens to be mainly a comment on some other resource, and use the link tag to point at it. I'd *actually* wished that things worked out such that link points to the entry, and links under discussion remain in the description or body of the entry. But since there's a disagreement over it, I'd just as soon give up the link tag to link bloggers and assume the GUID tag for permalinks and have done with it. This makes sense to me as a way to clear up the variations from blog to blog - right now, I'm never quite sure where I'll end up when I click on the link in my aggregator.
  • seizethedave
    So, it's just talking about a unique identifier such as the URL to the post, not the 32-bit {4A4DBF1F-81D8-4063-AE33-F6D1F942BB13} GUID MS cooked up?