Re: Some issues when creating my own feeds

Gerrit Kuilder wrote:
> I am creating some feeds with perl and XML::RSS. They validate through
> various rss validators and I can read them with RSSReader and
> Sharpreader, they also get updated through these two.
>
> Mozilla Thunderbird ( 1.02 and 1.5 RC1) somehow does not update them
> automaticly and even a refresh or get new articles does not help. The
> only thing I can do is unsubscribe to the feed and subscribe again.

This is just a wild guess, but I suspect that Thunderbird may not be capable 
of handling updating entries. It wouldn't surprise me if there were many 
aggregators that had this problem. Basically once they see an id that 
they've already retrieved they'll ignore it assuming it's a duplicate.

> This goes through an apache log file and pulls out the last played songs
> that I play through a web server.

This is not really an ideal scenario for an RSS feed. What happens when you 
change from a 10 track CD to an 8 track CD? From what I can make out you 
seem to be reusing the same set of IDs all the time. So the feed for the new 
CD will share the same IDs 1 to 8 as the feed for the old CD. Thus in an 
aggregator, the first 8 tracks will update to reflect the contents of the 
new CD, but tracks 9 and 10 will still be showing the entries from the first 
CD.

A better solution may be to provide a whole new set of IDs for each CD. Then 
in an aggregator, you'll see a new set of entries each time a CD is changed. 
Tracks from previous CDs will also be visible in the list, but they'll all 
be neatly grouped together - nothing will ever be overwritten.

And yet another alternative would be to include one entry in the feed for 
each CD and make the content of the entry list all the tracks of the CD. 
Every time the the CD changes, the feed gets a new entry.

> I also re-create the whole feed from scratch so all the items get a new
> timestamp, even if they were in the feed previously
> Sharpreader marks as new only the ones that weren't in the feed before.
> RSSReader, displayes all ten as new,  lot of repeats, I kinda think that
> is correct behaviour but that means extra work for me.

Why include a date at all? It's not required and it's obviously not serving 
any real purpose the way you're currently using.

Regards
James


 
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