I don’t want to wade into an RSS syntax debate, but I came across a practical example of why to duplicate the Guid and Link elements in your RSS 2.0 file. Rogers Cadenhead recommends that they be duplicated. It is one of two differences between Rogers’ new proposed RSS feed for Movable Type users and Brad Choate’s version (which I had used). The other difference is that Brad uses excerpted entries for the Description tag, whereas Rogers advocates the full entry. I agree with Rogers there, so that was the one alteration I made to Brad’s version when I implemented it. But the Guid / Link thing, I didn’t think it was a big deal to not have the Link element under each Item…so long as you had a Guid. What’s a Guid? The RSS 2.0 Spec defines it as:
“guid stands for globally unique identifier. It’s a string that uniquely identifies the item. When present, an aggregator may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new.”
Anyway in the comments to my last post, Adrian McEwen pointed out that the Aggregator he uses does not display my permalinks:
“…at the moment people clicking through from your RSS feed (like I’ve just done) don’t actually get taken to the individual post, they get the main http://www.readwriteweb.com/ (at least that’s what happens with nntp//rss)”
I went and checked out nntp//rss and it turns out it’s a new form of RSS Aggregator I’d not come across before:
“Bridging the worlds of NNTP clients and RSS feeds, nntp//rss is an application that will enable you to use your existing favorite NNTP newsreader to read your information channels.”
The demo uses version 0.4 of nntp//rss, which appears to pick up Guid OK. They didn’t have my RSS feed in the demo, but I checked the Scripting News feed and it was fine. However Adrian is using version 0.3, which didn’t display permalinks for either me or Dave Winer. So maybe it was just a bug in nntp//rss v 0.3. However it does go to show there’s no harm in duplicating Guid and Link! So I’ve gone and made that change to my RSS feed.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)