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a little warning about flickr feeds

October 18, 2008 in Flickr, RSS, whoisi | 2 comments

Last night I discovered the hard way that flickr uses slightly different GUIDs in its RSS and Atom feeds for the same entries.  The format looks something like this in the Atom feed:

tag:flickr.com,2005:/photo/12345678

And in the RSS2 feed:

tag:flickr.com,2004:/photo/12345678

Notice the difference?  The photo ID is the same, the tag (a year, probably?) is slightly different.

I converted everyone’s Flickr feeds on whoisi to use RSS2 instead of Atom because the RSS2 feeds contain the thumbnail as part of the <media:thumbnail> element instead of having to make a separate call to the Flickr API.  This makes things like preview and adding new sites super-fast and it will probably let me remove a thousand lines of python and JS from the whoisi source code.

But the side effect was that with new IDs every entry looked new.  And I suddenly had a few thousand new entries in my unseen page on whoisi.  I spent some time last night and this morning cleaning up the database to reflect the proper GUIDs in flickr feeds.

  1. Thomas Thurman’s avatar

    Thomas Thurman on October 18, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    I have pointed out a major slip like that before to them and it was fixed in days, together with a note from one of their coders apologising. I was impressed.

  2. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on October 18, 2008 at 3:21 pm

    At this point I really don’t want them changing it again. That would cause all kinds of chaos.

    Come to think of it, I’m 99% sure that twitter did this at one point and I had to scramble in that case as well.