Hey everyone, I’ve got a potentially dumb question about the way Newsblur (and its API) works.
I’m using the API to retrieve the new saved stories from my account, and I treat the story hash as the unique identifier of a story. However, recently I ran into a problem where it seemed like a story’s hash had changed some time after it was starred. Is it actually possible, or should I look into other explanations? (There are a few, but this one looks the easiest.)
Thanks!
Story hashes do change when the story’s guid changes. But if a story updates it’s permalink/guid (which happens often enough) then NewsBlur will change all of your read stories to match. So unless you’re doing something exotic—which, cool! please tell me about it—stories stay read even though the story_hash changes.
Ah, thanks a lot, @samuelclay! What would you suggest to use as the unique identifier of a story that always stays the same then? (Generally speaking, my goal is to fetch new starred stories every once in a while, so my app keeps fetching until it hits a hash it already encountered.)
There’s nothing that will guarantee it won’t change, but generally when that happens you’re going to see duplicates while a publisher switches backends.