RSS irritation

If you’re reading my blog via the original RSS feed in Bloglines you might see a few incomplete entries. I posted a few entries before they were done. I went back and finished them a short time later. Before I posted the updates, Bloglines polled my RSS feed and grabbed these entries. With RSS 0.92 there’s no way to identify items with unique IDs so the incomplete entries appear as well as the updates. With my RSS 2.0 feed each item has a unique ID (guid) so the updated items replace the old ones. At least that’s what I see in Bloglines. I’ve noticed multiple versions of the same item with other feeds (such as Doc Searls Weblog) so it seems like Bloglines must use the item guid when it’s available and compare timestamps or content when it’s missing. Doc Searl’s feed is RSS 2,0 but doesn’t contain guid tags for items.