Unique IDs for posts

  • I had some problems with Google Reader, that I asked Google about in their help forum, and they told me:

    What this usually means is that the feed is reusing item IDs. This makes Reader think that the new item is actually an update to a previous item, so it goes back and updates that item rather than showing it as new. If you want to avoid this problem, you’ll need to make sure every post you ever make in your blog has a unique ID.

    Anyone out there know how I can make each post have a unique ID to solve the Google Reader problem?

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  • Go back and tell them this is unlikely to be the issue for your blog.

    What they are referring to is the guid element that each item in a RSS(2) feed will contain. WordPress by default inserts the URI (permalink) for the post in this field.* In fact it is attached to each post as a record in the posts table under the column ‘guid’ (if that’s not clear enough). By any definition, a post’s permalink will be an unique identifier.

    Looking at the source of your site’s RSS2 feed, I see exactly what I expect to, which is the unique permalink to each post in each guid element.

    * Technically the guid can be defined as an url (the guid attribute for this is isPermaLink), though WordPress sets this to false. In any case, it has nothing to do for how a syndication reader interprets the ‘uniqueness’ of what is used in the field.

    i am having the same problem. google reader shows some of my posts written in may this year 2 be written in last year.

    i see in my feed at https://blog.ravidreams.net/feed/ that the guid is the post id not the permalink. i had previously imported posts when i moved server and that resulted in change in post ids and i had 2 delete a few. is it possible that some of the old post ids r used and that’s y they r shown as old posts? how to change this post id guid into the actual pretty permalink?

    i am confused since igoogle, firefox live bookmarks can all update correctly and only bloglines, google reader having a problem. is this really not a blog feed problem?

    Thanks

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