My Guid Could Beat Up Your Guid

Workbench was named Feedster's Feed of the Year, leading Greg Knauss to send this congratulatory e-mail:

I've thought for a long time that Workbench's RSS 2.0 feed was really well-formed, and its use of optional attributes exemplary. He's got a well-designed guid format, and his output in areas where the standards document is ambiguous* is always consistent.
What? They were talking about the content, too? Even better!
* No, I couldn't resist.

I've been hoping for years that someone would peek beneath Workbench's HTML representation and notice the cut of its guid. I was so excited about the Tag URI scheme back in 2004 that I gave myself one: People may describe me unambiguously throughout the world as tag:cadenhead.org,2004-05-17:Rogers.

Under the scheme, an item in a syndicated feed can be given a globally unique identifier like this:

tag:cadenhead.org,2004:weblog.2839

The tag consists of four things:

The text "tag:"
A domain you control, followed by a comma
A date or year you controlled the domain, followed by a colon
A unique ID you don't use for an item on any other site

For this weblog, the unique ID is "weblog." followed by the entry's primary key in the MySQL database. If a service like Feedster reads this guid, it won't save the same item from Workbench more than once in its database, no matter how many feeds the entry turns up in.

In October, the TAG URI scheme was published as RFC 4151.

Journalism · 2006/01/04 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Nerd.

#1 · Greg Knauss · 2006/01/04

Rogers:

The N-th Tier (where N > 2) of Bloggers are having a "conversation" about BlogRolls.

As in "hey... we used to help each other out... like neighbors... wa' happened to us?"

So, since you're on a roll here (award wize) it's time for me to grovel and ask you to add me to your BlogRoll... and then just lay back and harbor this nasty grudge.

Being a real codewarrior you could hack out an auto blogroll scripts, huh? And sell it to the N-tier for *free*... like a true neighbor.

Congratulations on the recognition... enjoy it before I start that grudge :^)

McD

#2 · McD McBlog · 2006/01/04

LOL, the cut of your guid.

Mr. Burns must be a big fan.

#3 · justsomeguy · 2006/01/05

Cool, an intelligent discussion about GUIDs. I've been waiting a long time for this. :-)

That said, let me ask a stupid and uninformed question: how does the purpose of the tag: scheme differ from that of urn:? I need to reread the relevant specs, but in the meantime I'd be most interested in any insights that others might have.

PS: Since you are talking up your feed, I should point out that the Comments link at the bottom of each post appears to be broken (at least in Bloglines).

#4 · Matthew Gertner · 2006/01/05

That's some nice info, is this implemented in the new blog software packages?

#5 · Friedrich · 2006/01/05

Well deserved, old cock. Good on ya. Now where's your post about Vince Young and the Horns?

#6 · Uncle Mikey · 2006/01/05

Over on SportsFilter. That was an incredible game.

#7 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2006/01/05

While you are on the subject of your feed, you need to fix the <comments> links. They are broken.

The link in your rss feed is:

www.cadenhead.org

but it should be:

www.cadenhead.org

Thanks,

Ray

#8 · Ray Baxter · 2006/01/10

Also, I like your preview feature. Have you written about how it works anywhere??

It doesn't correctly handle the unmarked up urls that I entered in my previous comment.

#9 · Ray Baxter · 2006/01/10