Hi

I use the RSS feed to keep up to date with news from the SETI@home web site.

I am using RSS Bandit v 1.3.0.29 but it did not update when the update was added to the Cogent issue dated 3rd May. My RSS reader did not flag that the item was updated and still shows the original news text, neither of the two text updates are shown. As such I was unaware of the updates until I went to the SETI@home web page directly.

Is this a bug in my RSS reader or should something be added to the RSS XML file to make my reader know new text has been added?

Many thanks

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I didn't really believe that this is to solve. The RSS concept is not good usable for 'updating' news. ;)

I don't know how your reader know about a new item (news), but because SETI@home RSS don't use a pubDate field on items at the moment, I would thing it may uses the headline to compare and identify if a item is new. And the Headline didn't change.

But I am happy that the news is updated as needed. It is not easy for the project team to do this beside solving then problems and improving the project and I don't believe that we should make it more complicate for them.

I know some possible ways to improve the handling, but all have issues. For my feeling the current handling is not the best, but we can live with it, when from time to time such a 'updating' doesn't work as it should. But I will have again a look on it.

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Greetings from Bremen/Germany
Jens Seidler (TheBigJens)

Thanks for the update Jens,

My RSS reader puts a number after the folder to show new items e.g. abc_science(4) will show that there are 4 new unread items in that feed. Optionally it will pop an alert if something new is automatically added (default is to check once every 60 minutes)

Alas for SETI@home, BOINC and Einstein@home neither of these methods of notification ever happens so am not alerted to new items. Maybe it is related to the pubdate field, I am no expert in RSS, but the reader has a column for date which for all items in the above three feeds reads the same.

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<blockquote>... neither of these methods of notification ever happens so am not alerted to new items. Maybe it is related to the pubdate field, ... </blockquote>

Yes, you are right, this is depending on the missing pubDate field. We are testing a new RSS release with pubDate at Pirates@home, maybe you want to test it, but they have not so much news. ;)

But I am unsure how pubDate should be if the news is "updated". For my feeling it is the date, the news was given to the public. If days or weeks later the news is updated, updating this "publish date" seems not to be right to me.

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Greetings from Bremen/Germany
Jens Seidler (TheBigJens)

Hi Jens

I have signed up for the Pirates rss feed, I set my properties so that it looked for news up to one year old.

Great news is that the Pirate folder was flagged with 4 new items.

On looking at the publish date I noticed that the dates were different but that the times were all the same at 05:00:00. Looking at the XML directly I noticed some had a time of 05:00:00 GMT and some 04:00:00 GMT. I guess that GMT is the key, since my time zone is now GMT + 1 hour I guess that my RSS reader has adjusted to local time. Maybe this time field is what would need to be adjusted if an update was added to an exisitng news item. I think then that the RSS reader would refresh it and flag as unread again.

What is a little odd is that the news items from March are missing in my RSS reader. Two in April and one each in January and February but none for March. Any ideas? Maybe a problem with the RSS reader?

A screen shot of what my RSS reader shows is available at

http://mercury.walagata.com/w/appetiser/pirates.jpg

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this could be due to the limitations of RSS, or the broken GUID implementation that SETI uses (so it appears that there are no new items)

i suspect that broken GUIDs are the actual cause

a better feed reader is SharpReader which can read everything and notifies you when items have been updated

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