Content ID in RSS feeds

[Daniel Vydra]

Hi,
I'm a developer at the Guardian. In response to requests for better
integration between guardian.co.uk RSS and the API (see:
http://groups.google.com/group/guardian-api-talk/t/58c85d663443d386),
we're making a change to the Guardian RSS feeds to include, where
available, the content ID in all our RSS feeds.

Each item in our RSS feeds will now contain a Dublin Core identifier
field with that piece of content's unique ID. If the item does not
reference a piece of content that would be in the API, the
dc:identifier element will not be present.

eg:
<dc:identifier>353255896</dc:identifier>

This ID can then be used to look up that piece of content in the API,
using the content/item/<item-id> request. See http://api.guardianapis.com/docs/item.html
for more details.

Look for this change to appear in our RSS feeds in the next couple of
days, and I'll post again once it's live.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about this, please fire
away.

Thanks,
Daniel Vydra
Tech Dev Response Team Lead
daniel...@guardian.co.uk

[GrantK]

Hi

This has gone out the door now...

If you look in the RSS feeds you will now find
<dc:identifier>355108906</dc:identifier> in most items.

As Dan mentioned this is the content id and you can use it to find
that piece of content from the api.

[tom.d...@googlemail.com]

Yay!

Now I don't have to use a horrible XPath scraper and silly sqlite
database to store URLs and content IDs.

Many thanks.