Re: Being kind to clients

["muir_woods" <JohnMunsch@zwave.com>]

--- In syndication@y..., Julian Bond <julian_bond@v...> wrote:
> Can I make a request to providers to be kind to clients by limiting 
the
> size and age of items that are sent to clients?
> 
> I store 4 weeks of news from each of the providers I read. There 
are a
> few blogs that include items in their RSS that are older than that. 
So
> every 4 weeks I see the same old items come round again as new.

A better solution is simply to build the functionality into the 
reader. The RSS library in HotSheet uses an itemHistory to keep an 
MD5 hash of the title/link of each news item retrieved. When a new 
retrieval is done, each item pulled has its hash generated and it is 
checked against the history to see if it is new or just a repeat. 
This basically never fails, I see items reappear very very rarely and 
can often spot that the reason for a repeat when one does occur is 
that the title of the item was changed after its initial appearance 
in the RSS feed.

John Munsch
http://www.johnmunsch.com/projects/HotSheet