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What's a reliable way to check an RSS feed for new entries?

The part of the app I am building is to check RSS feeds for updates. I'm looking for a reliable way to find out if a channel has new entries.

I know that sometimes people make records to the future and then post messages to the present, which can lead to some records being hidden. It looks like there might be more complications than that. I also know that hashing the title or content will lead to poor performance and unreliable results, as they can change and are not a sign of new entries. And I know that a few years ago when I maintained a podcast RSS feed manually, I never changed the item.

So, I need to somehow reliably check RSS, Atom, etc. for new entries as they were saved.

Specifically, this application will be written in Python for Google App Engine using Universal Parser , but I doubt this is too much of a case.

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You can use conditional get by adding an if-modified-since header to your HTTP request. Well-executed servers will return 304 unmodified servers if there is no change.



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Feed items have a unique ID and / or URL, which can be unique. The hash is just those to get a quick and sane way to detect changes. But the only way to be absolutely sure is the hash content, as you said.



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