As has been pointed out to me, the IDs I was using for my RSS feed entries were not as permanently unique and robust as they could be.
As one who can sometimes not let go of a bone once it's been picked up, I decided to do something about it.
Right now, I'm sitting on a branch of this site that has a new ID for each entry that is based on the MD5 hash of the filename for the post, note, or til entry.
The approach uses the tag URI scheme that was noted in my blog post about this, which I had learned from Evan's blog post.
Evan's approach to create these IDs uses a tool called Expanso that generates an MD5 hash of his posts.
While I have done a similar thing, i.e., generating an MD5 hash of the filename, I have not used Expanso to do it. Instead, I wrote a small node script that does the job.
I wrote the script to process all the files in a directory, or just a specific file.
If you are interested taking a closer look at this approach, check out this GitHub repo. The README contains everything you need to know.
Finally, the reason that I have not yet merged that repo branch that I referred to up front is that it will result in a flood of new entries arriving in everyone's feed reader.
I will, at some point in the near future, put out a FLOOD WARNING post to let everyone know that it's coming.
- Previous post: Creating quasi-permanently unique entry IDs for RSS