We are using Google Sites Content Feed API with classic Google sites for long years(since about 6 years ago).
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/sites/docs/1.0/developers_guide_protocol#ContentFeedGET
Our service shows lists of latest 30 pages belong to specific announcement template pages. To show latest and save traffic cost, we use Google Sites Content Feed API with descending order by decent updated time and limit 30 pages for each API request.
In our service, through Google Sites Content Feed API,
often we have problems with updated datetime for contents.
The updated attribute sometimes become very strange timestamp.
description
Although our users does not update any contents, sometimes almost all timestamp of contents are updated automatically as same or very near timestamp without update manually as below:
Before
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| page title | published date | updated date |
| test1 | 2015-03-21 14:51:55 | 2015-03-21 14:51:55 |
| test2 | 2015-03-24 08:09:51 | 2015-03-24 08:09:51 |
| test3 | 2015-04-30 19:30:00 | 2015-04-30 19:30:00 |
----------------------------------------------------------
After(sometimes occur)
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| page title | published date | updated date |
| test1 | 2015-03-21 14:51:55 | 2015-05-16 07:30:00 |
| test2 | 2015-03-24 08:09:51 | 2015-05-16 07:30:00 |
| test3 | 2015-04-30 19:30:00 | 2015-05-16 07:30:01 |
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Once it occur, Google Content Feed API results with limit latest N become useless at all! After that, it returns only too old post and does not return any real latest updated one...
We guess that may be operational problem of users. Probably it occurs when users update properties or permissions their whole Google Site's contents manually for administrative operations.
This problem is not only on specific site and organization. Many organizations who use our service frequently complains about it. If it is not operational problem, perhaps it occurred by a bug or specificational reason on Google Sites ( or it's API). We have been searching the documentation but we can not find any specification about that.
We want to know Why these contents are updated in fact. And we want to solve/avoid this problem somehow.
We are sure it is not a bug of our system because our service is read only service so that has no API permission to write.
API sample
we use the API as follows:
- A user register a announcement content URL. (it can be one or more)
https://sites.google.com/a/example.com/our-great-site/info - Parse the URL and call Google Sites Content Feed API to obtain feedLink URL.
https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/example.com/our-great-site?path=/inforeturns gd:feedLink:https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/example.com/our-great-site?parent=7049586268762714903 - Call FeedLink URL for list of contents.
https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/example.com/our-great-site?parent=7049586268762714903&max-results=30 - some updated timestamps of contents become strange sometimes. it returns too old content without latest content.
