Feed Informer: Forums » Topic: Updating Feeds

admin on "Updating Feeds"

admin — Tue, 22 May 2007 09:42:09 +0000

The ID was the bit in the URL you pasted, so that's okay.

Can you explain what you mean 'it still shows the old GUID'? If you're talking about http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/ZENMPLB8KL.rss.. then those GUID are made on the fly and are not the same as those you specify in the source feed, but that's how it always is. We do not store your GUIDs to reuse, we just use them to track content. In theory your items should be recrawled now if they have a different GUID.

Is there a particular item that seems out of date, etc?

blisti on "Updating Feeds"

blisti — Tue, 22 May 2007 04:54:42 +0000

Hi, the digest in question is: http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/ZENMPLB8KL.html

As a test, I've changed the GUID on this feed only: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/rich_ferguson/rss.xml

The GUID is now a number that represents the time the post was most recently modified. On the rss.xml feed the guid now reads (for the most recent post, updated at 14:09 yesterday):
<guid isPermaLink="false">1411409</guid>

But on the feed digest, it still shows the old guid.

Any ideas?

Our digest is called "The Nervous Breakdown" - I'm not sure if that's the ID? Or perhaps it's "57951" ?

admin on "Updating Feeds"

admin — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:31:00 +0000

I'd need full URL for the feed in question and the ID of the digest and I can investigate it tomorrow.

You aren't using FeedBurner, right?

blisti on "Updating Feeds"

blisti — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:04:24 +0000

Ok, so I figured out where the GUID is and where to make it change when the post is modified, but I still don't see Feed Burner updating my digest. Do you know how long it takes for the digest to get refreshed? (I'm also trying to trick it into refreshing by re-saving the digest options.)

blisti on "Updating Feeds"

blisti — Mon, 21 May 2007 16:26:49 +0000

Here's the GUID I get in my feed digest RSS:
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/rich_ferguson/2007/05/here_it_is_a_fr.html?</guid>

We're using typepad.

Do you know where the GUID gets generated? I just can't seem to figure it out, and they seem to be stopping our digest from refreshing often enough.

admin on "Updating Feeds"

admin — Mon, 21 May 2007 16:20:27 +0000

We don't add any GUIDs. We just use them if they're present in source feeds. Since these are globally unique, we consider an item "done" based on its GUID. If the GUID changes, we recrawl it. We have to do this otherwise we'd be processing 80000+ feeds in full every few minutes :) Source feed items without GUIDs are tracked based on destination URL and title, but this only works if the GUID is actually not present.

The reason we switched to this system is because there were many feeds (mostly weather or horoscope related) where item titles and URLs never updated but the GUID did.. so we moved to using the GUID if present. This has had a lot of benefits, but naturally there are some downsides in situations like this.

In theory I can refresh feeds for you manually and have them recrawled from new, but this is not really an ongoing solution.

The "fix" for this problem is for us to have a "what's in the feed is what's in our database" system which doesn't do archiving, etc, but literally just replaces all content in our database with what's in the feed at the time. This would help in situations like this, but is not ready to roll as yet.

blisti on "Updating Feeds"

blisti — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:33:26 +0000

Hi, I'm trying to aggregate multiple feeds, but Feed Digest doesn't seem to be updating the digest when the feed titles or content changes. I think this is because Feed Digest is adding a GUID somewhere, but I can't figure out how to edit them or ignore them.

The digest: http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/ZENMPLB8KL.html

Let me know if there's a way to ignore the GUID's and update according to new titles/content. Thanks!