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mysociety / theyworkforyou

Keeping tabs on the UK's parliaments and assemblies
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
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consider adding a <guid> element to each item in RSS feeds #427

Open mhl opened 10 years ago

mhl commented 10 years ago

I suspect that what's going on here is really a problem with the RSS consumer that's being used on the site, but note that the "Winter Floods" entry is duplicated:

... although it only appears once in the RSS feed. I assume this is because the RSS consumer has somehow detected it as a new item, even though the link and description data appear to be identical. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's any way for me to find out what previous version of the RSS feed were to find differences, e.g. was pubDate changed?)

However, I wonder if adding a guid element (just based on a hash of the link URL, perhaps) would help out some RSS consumers not to include duplicates.

struan commented 10 years ago

This links are different in that one is http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2014-02-06b.443.0&m=40381#g455.5 and the other is http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2014-02-06a.443.0&m=40381#g455.5 note a vs b so in this case the RSS reader has done the right think as they're not the same item. As you say, a guid would help with this as then it would be clear that they were linking to the same resource.

mhl commented 10 years ago

@struan: ah, thanks - I eyeballed them several times, but failed to spot that a/b difference; I should have diffed...