Google Reader – "Mark As Read" issue fixed!

February 26th, 2008

Devdatta few days back informed about a bug. Even if he was marking scraps as read they were appearing again.

Actually it took 3 days to figure out where the bug is. Fixing it after that was childs play! ;-)

There is guid tag is RSS Feed which supposed to be unique per atom. I guess Google Reader uses this to keep track of which item was marked.

Now problem was if look at scrapbook at any time  there might be more than one scrap from same friend. So using friends orkut profile link was resulting is collision.

Then I appended small random string to URL to avoid collision. Here at this point I messed code. Now guid was unique but random so for same item on every access Google Reader was getting new guid’s! So it was failing to keep track of read scraps!

Now change I made is: replaced random string by md5 hash! Now its unique and permanent as md5 has is computed using scraps content part only which is uneditable in any way!

Point of this story is – feeds produced by Orkutfeeds now should work with Google Reader & other feed reader without any problem!

If problem persists, let us know… :-)

Posted in Orkutfeeds 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Google Reader – "Mark As Read" issue fixed!”

  1. 1 TechPavan
    March 1st, 2008 at 9:14 am

    I felt the same problem today….I think this has not been fixed compeletely….

  2. 2 admin
    March 1st, 2008 at 9:43 pm

    @TechPavan
    Actually bug was fixed but while updating old scrapbook code without fix was uploaded to server… :-(
    So sorry for trouble bro..
    Everything should work now as fix is reapplied! :-)

  3. 3 Varun
    March 28th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    not working fine at all

    man instead of random or md5 in end of use date and time
    like 200803282225

    this trick is used even by mybloglog when a communty is created

    gr8 work any how
    review soon on my blog too
    already email friends

  4. 4 Rahul Bansal
    March 29th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    @Varun
    Issue is fixed again (for a while)

    You have nice idea but there is a problem.
    Timestamps on orkut keeps changing so we can’t use something like 200803282225…

    We need something “fixed” in guid field and scraps/posts are uneditable so their content works fine… atleast in our case!

    Please feel free to correct me if I am missing something… :-)

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