Historical Material from RSSFormat

Currently FlexWiki generates RSS that has a single item for each topic, and when a change is made to the topic the item is updated with the change information. FlexWiki does not update the GUID for the item though, which causes some newsreaders to ignore the update. (for example FeedDemon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp))

One possible solution would be to update the GUID for the item when it is updated. This would cause newsreaders to treat the post as a new item instead of as an updated item. This would cause the feed to work in newsreaders like FeedDemon, but it would also create more items in the feed, as every change would be a new item.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to better change the RSS? Would this change adversely affect the way you use the feed?

-- JamesAvery

I think the behavior of your aggregator (whether to designate changed posts as new or not) should be configurable in the aggregator. If your aggregator doesn't support that behavior, then I think the fault lies there.

It would be possible to generate the GUID to point to a specific version of the page (in which case it would change every time there was an update) but I actually prefer the way it works now and I think it's more in line with the spirit of RSS.

My aggregator of choice (Newsgator) lets me choose whether to show updated items as new or not on a per-feed basis.

-- TommyWilliams

What do the Asp.Net forums do w/ RSS? When a post (single item, I presume) is changed (added to) the text of the addition is received... - YarkoT

I'm only guessing, but I would have to assume that a new item is added to the feed. This could have serious bandwidth considerations if all changes get an item in the feed, but one way to handle this is to have a "changes since" parameter in the query string for the RSS feed. Or encode it in the ContentBase somehow. This is something that could be added to FlexWiki without getting rid of the current capability, to allow people to chose their mode of access. Volunteers to code it up? -- CraigAndera

I'm not totally up on RSS, having just started to use it, but the current behavior is annoying. TommyWilliams suggests above that this is because of the RSS Reader, I use SharpReader, which seems logical. Does anyone else have input about that? Agree/Disagree? Should we work on modifying the RSS readers, or is there another solution to how the feed is handled?

For me, this would be a very useful feature since we are using the Wiki to host our Development Methodology. Most of the team has started using RSS, so if they got the updates when they are made this would be a big help. - ErikS

I'm new to RSS as well, and I'm running a DotNetNuke (DNN) website. The DNN is an aspx-based portal solution (open source), and one of the modules in it is an RSS reader. But when I try getting your newletter, for example, on my reader, I get the following exception:

 Could Not Connect To http://www.flexwiki.com/rss.aspx?newsletter=FlexWiki.HourlyChangesNewsletter.
 You Should Verify The Source Address Is Valid And That Your Hosting Provider Has Configured Their
 Proxy Server Settings Correctly.

Anybody got some ideas on if this indicates a problem on the sender of the feed (flexwiki) or the receiver? - DanGilleland

This has been entered as bug 1039230 in SourceForge.