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So I have played with the idea of making a specialized RSS-reader for some time now, but I have never gotten around to it. I have several project that could benefit from reading feeds in one way or another.

One project for this is an RSS-bot for an IRC-channel I'm on. But I havent quite wrapped my mind around how I can "mark as read" a story, so that it doesn't spit out all the stories in the feed everytime it runs.

Now, I haven't read the specs extencively yet either, so there might be some kind of unique ID I could use to mark the entry as read using a database of some kind. But is this the right way to do it?

Giorgi
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Christian Wattengård
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1 Answers1

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From reading the specs for RSS 2.0 at ttp://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt it seems each item has a GUID which you can use to know which articles have been read or not.

Nathan W
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  • That of course depends on people properly assigning GUID to their feed items. I suppose most "off-the-shelve" solutions will be fine, your mileage may vary with handrolled feeds. – Thilo Sep 20 '10 at 06:35
  • True, not much you can do to avoid that really. I guess Christian could have a look at some open source RSS readers to see how they handle the problem of having no GUID. – Nathan W Sep 20 '10 at 06:39