Monday, 30. September 2002

GUIDs in Radio

I want to do Radio to the Past. I have to accept renumbering Posts. So I need something to permanently identifying posts.

Kit uses a timestamp for permalinks but this changes too, if you change a date. So I have added a new value to every posting called guid (which is slightly misleading since it is not a globlal uniqe ID). The guid is strictly numerical since I have been told that some comments have problems with alpha-numericcal IDs. It is generating by concentrating the original time of a posting and its original number, e.g. "2002093000102900002019" which should to my understanding guarantees that it is uniqe. Once created it is never changed again.

I have created a function getGuid(item) which returns the guid creating a new one if a post doesn't have already one. By calling getGuid() from user.radio.callbacks.postItem.createGuid I ensure that every new posting has a guid.

Now I can use my new functions permalinkId(), permalinkUrl(), permalink() to create guid based permalinks. This permalinks still break if the date of a posting changes. I might be able to fix this by creating a permalink to webpage mapping page, I hav eto look into this.

I also created XML-RPC functions to map a guid to a postid so my Python scripts can acces postings by guid.

Next I will try to use this guid in RSS 2.0 creation. As far as I understand this will give us the benefit that a Aggregator can identify the same item posted to different categories. I will have to look into this.

BTW: there is still an error in permalink creation. They all point to the homepage which is a problem for items not posted to the homepage. I'll have to fix that.
10:44 | #

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif