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December 11, 2004
Dan Sheridan Suggests RSS GUID
Another very cool idea on RSS throttling: have your system assign a unique GUID to handle the user-side tracking through firewalls, proxies, anonymizers, etc. This Dan (do all Dans write about aggregation?) notes that I'd have to update all existing feeds to get the best benefit. But this is a good moving-forward idea. Perhaps a migration would be in order over time.
I can see how to implement this using PHP, but there is a load factor. I would want every page load with an RSS icon on it to have a unique session ID--unique in a MySQL database table--rather than a redirect.
If I just had rss.xml -> rss_GUID.xml calculated through my throttling script, then aggregators that don't honor redirects during subscription would still request the old file time and again. Actually, that's probably okay. That would mean less-sophisticated aggregators would be restricted across IP + proxy + http_via, while more sophisticated (and thus better behaved aggregators) would be throttled just by their GUID.
There are some issues about what happens to differentiate the same aggregator that keeps getting new GUIDs that it doesn't "recall" over time. More thinking on this is necessary to avoid restricting users.
Posted by Glennf at December 11, 2004 02:21 PM