Change RSS feed, but only new items

1
votes

I'm fairly new to PHP, and I'm trying to write a script that solves the following

  • I have an RSS feed that gets saved to my server every 10 minutes (copied from elsewhere).
  • There is a problem with the timestamps (pubDate tag) on the RSS feed, they always have the correct date but 00:00:00 GMT as the timestamp (I have no control over this).
  • Therefor, when I use an autotweeting program to tweet updates from the feed (it checks it every hour or so), it won't - It only tweets the first update of each day as a result.

Therefor, what I'm trying to do to fix it to some degree is to check if the feed has changed, and if it has, change the saved pubDate to the current server time on only the new items.

I'm also kind of confused as to how I can have it check for changes - If I have a corrected version (with fairly accurate timestamps) saved to my server, it will ALWAYS think there are changes, because the timestamps will always be 00:00:00. I'm thinking, check both feeds for items including the full strings such as <guid isPermaLink="true">http://services.runescape.com/m=adventurers-log/a=161/display_player_profile.ws?searchName=A13d&amp;id=-463827091</guid> - Since the id= at the end stays constant, it would only change the <pubDate> of items found to be new.

http://services.runescape.com/m=adventurers-log/a=161/rssfeed?searchName=A13d Here is a feed as an example. If anyone could get me started or point me to some kind of tutorial that might help, I'd really appreciate it. This is over my head, but something I need to learn how to do.

1
phprss

1 Answers

0
votes

Maybe there is something wrong with your code parsing the timestamp, date format perhaps?

I believe the method of doing full string comparisons(<title> & <description>) between items with the same <guid> is your best bet. Here is some reading about RSS duplicate detection if you are interested.