Re: Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:41:48PM -0700, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> Jeremy Zawodny wrote:
> 
> >Okay, as noted here:
> >
> >   http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000952.html
> >
> >They're up for real this time.
> >
>
> It looks like that the <link> for each item in the feed changes every 
> time the feed is fetched.

I'm not seeing that happen. 

Can anyone else reproduce it?  If so, what RSS URL?

I'm testing with:

  http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories

and it seems okay. 

> It looks like a tracking URL is being used, perhaps to correlate a
> link to a particular RSS fetch.

It's a tracking URL to track that your click came from the RSS feed,
but not from a particular fetch. 

> I don't mind the tracking aspect, but because the link changes,
> Bloglines considers each item as being updated every time we fetch
> one of the feeds. We track which items each user has read, and when
> an item is updated, we treat it as an unread item. So users end up
> seeing items they've already read, over and over.

Why not use the guid?

> Any chance of getting this changed? We could special case the Yahoo 
> feeds. Or we could ignore changes to <link> tags in general. Both are 
> doable, but suboptimal.

If it's really happening the way you say it is (I'm confirming that
internally, but I seriously doubt it), then I'd argue that it's very
wrong too.

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny     |  Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo!
<Jeremy-LaWf/[email protected]>  |  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/

 

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