A short note on FeedWriter and IDs
As I previously mentioned, I used this neat little class called FeedWriter again for my EtherFeed script.
Despite of its general usefulness I ran into a curious problem with it because the link contained in every feed item point to the exact same URL (the one of the Etherpad). FeedWriter uses this URL as material for UUID generation. See the problem?
Right, all feed items had the same ID field which caused feed readers that took the standard seriously (like Apple Mail and Opera) to think that the feed contained only one item that was updated regularly instead of treating every new revision as a new unread item.
A quick fix for that is to add some uniqueness to the link URL. In my case I used the a timestamp that was part of the name of the HTML files that EtherFeed uses to store revisions. I just added this timestamp as a GET parameter to the link URL which doesn’t cause any harm but solves the ID problem quickly.
Of course, the better and cleaner way would be to enable the FeedWriter class to use not only the link URL for its ID generator but to accept a custom value instead. Maybe I’ll fix that and post the new code for the class here later.
