How do I fool the rss feed into not updating?

September 24, 2008 2:07 PM

Is there a way to update information on a website that has an rss feed and have the feed not show the pages as "updated?" I have a collection of news releases that were inconsistently showing some information. I made them consistent, but the next time I update the rss feed, every news release I did this year will come up as new. Any way to prevent that?
posted by answergrape to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

How are you publishing the RSS feed? If your feed's <item> elements have <guid> sub-elements, you can update the content without changing the GUIDs and conformant aggregators and readers should treat the items as already-seen. But if some automated tool is packaging your site's content for RSS distribution then it may be updating their GUIDs based on its own idea of when the content has been updated.
posted by nicwolff at 4:36 PM on September 24, 2008