If you are subscribed to my feed, you might have been bombarded by old items being marked as new in your feed reader. This is entirely my fault, and I want to apologize. I know this is extremely inconvenient. I hope you stay subscribed. But I understand if you feel otherwise.
The Reason
So, there is a reason why this happens. Mind you, this is not an excuse, just the technical reason.
When I started writing the software behind this blog, I was completely ignorant of the specifics of the ATOM format. And being frustrated and naive, I didn’t read the spec for it.
ATOM is a particular beast. And in the field for the <id> of the items, I should have put a URI. In my stupidity, I thought it was supposed to be the relative URL of each item. I know I was stupid.
And over the past year, with a lot of the rewrites, I put plenty of effort into not breaking the feed. However, for each post I had to set the feed ID manually, and keeping track of it became a rather tedious act. More unpleasantly, unless I removed those items or I broke it, my feeds never validated.
For this reason, I decided not to live in the shadow of my past mistake and let you bear the annoyance. I know. I’m a selfish ass. From now on, however, the <id> of each post is a UUID that is automatically created and kept in the database.
Hopefully, this is the last time I break your feeds.