Re: [syndication] Persistence of items

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net>]

3/18/01 5:24:05 PM, Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com> wrote:

>Let's say you take an RSS feed from one source. You store the results in
>a dbms. You collect the feed regularly. The source updates the feed by
>adding items at the top and knocking them off the bottom so there's
>always 15. Is there any easy way of identifying a particular item
>between updates? I want the item to be persistent in my dbms so I can do
>other things with it.
>
>Is the only way to look for an exact match on the whole item, so the key
>would be Title+link+description for my channel_id? 

You might want to take an MD5 hash or similar checksum of the data you feel is 
necessary to identify an item and store it in the DBMS; it would make 
comparisons a little quicker, and would avoid having to change the DB schema 
if you decide to change the identifying information.