Nelson Minar was helping a friend sort out why: “Google Reader was sending folks to his own domain rather than directly to the link destination.”
Turns out it is because of the differences between guid and link elements in an RSS Feed. You can tell he’s really frustrated with the time and effort this cost him (my most recent RSS pet peeve is people who put dates in that occur several hours into the future), but I think it’s one of those maddening things that has a reasonable explanation. The presence of guid itself is optional, and the developer community as a whole has pretty much deprecated it’s use in favor of using “link”. So, when in doubt leave it out (or If the guid don’t fit, don’t submit … your edits back into SVN).
Andy Baio (who just completed a sweet redesign to Waxy) was having similar problems with the default guid behavior could potentially have used the guid element for his Waxy Links section. It would be within the bounds of the spec to have all the links pointing to the main Waxy.or: Links, but set each of their guid’s differently so as not to confuse RSS readers into thinking they had already consumed a particular page.
While this is certainly arcane knowledge of interest to only those working on a close basis with feeds and feedreaders, it’s interesting from a broader sense in how time, expectations, preset defaults and implicit decisions about how to use something effect actions made later on.
WHAT TO DO NOW?