I follow the New York Times technology feed via RSS (feed link). For the last couple of weeks, whenever the feed updates, NetNewsWire is convinced by some change in the feed that all the items in the feed are new to me. Since, as of this writing, there are headlines going back 4 days, to January 4, that is misleading. I’m not sure what the NYT is changing in their feeds to cause this blip, but it’s annoying. I think it’s because of the decision to mark the GUID “false” for the isPermaLink value, which probably pushes NNW to use the link value as the hyperlink. The content management system at the NYT changes the link value every time it generates the feed, it seems, or at least once daily. I wonder why the NYT made that decision.
I’m familiar with some of challenges of what should be a simpler process. For CNET News.com RSS feeds, the link and GUID URLs are identical (and therefore slightly redundant) because different aggregators have different rules (it seems) about which field to use as the hyperlink. Also, the GUID is marked as false for isPermaLink. I still don’t know if that’s the best decision technically, because the URL given is a permaLink, as far forward as I can predict given content management systems. At one time, we tried a slightly ‘cleaner’ version of the URL as the GUID, but then different aggregators started doing different things, so we sighed, and went back to current practice.
What is it about accepting the things you cannot change? I’ll let you know when I get there.