Re: [syndication] Persistence of items

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

In article <0dd701c0afd3$e4dc3190$33a1dc40@murphy2>, Dave Winer
<dave@userland.com> writes
>Julian, the problem you outline might be the beginning of a spec for an open
>source project. To write a shareable algorithm that computes the "distance"
>between two strings of characters. There's no hope of getting all the
>different content management systems to put a unique ID on every item. But a
>string that differs by only one character from another could be assumed to
>be the same "item". I think there's lots of prior art on this, but we've
>never had the time to write the code at UserLand, but it might make sense
>for a few developers to work together to create something we all can share.

I don't think it's as hard as that. ISTM that a high proportion of RSS
feeds add new items at the top and dump old items off the bottom. So
"old" items tend not to change very often. If this is the case enough of
the time, then I can just Key on the whole item to get persistence.

The thing that prompted that was noting the way RUOTD displays feeds
that change (especially synthetic feeds that are the result of a query)
over time. I frequently get the same item displayed several times in the
list as the channel appears several times. (did that make sense?) 

-- 
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