Today I had my lunch break at a cozy cafe. Their selection of sandwiches was so huge that I couldn’t decide. In the end, I just said:
”You pick.”
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options we have today, whether it’s choosing a sandwich, picking a notes app or deciding on a topping for your ice cream. The possibilities feel endless. And when we’ve finally decided, the voice in our head goes:
”Hmm, did I really make the right choice?”
It’s almost like the freedom has turned into a prison, and we’ve become the prisoners of possibilities. Caught in this mega multitude of options, longing for the calm comfort of someone saying:
”This is the one and only option.”
I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, and if any have changed, we broadcast the message that the item has changed. I'm doing a complete review of this, based on actual data, and found there were a fair number of places we were calling a change, when nothing that mattered had changed. Now I'm debating whether or not a pubDate change should be seen as an item change. My initial thought when we were working on RSS, was that the pubDate should never change. In the real world of publishing I don't think the publication date changes. Right? Of course some feeds do change the pubDate because that's the art of feeds (sorry for the sarcasm). But I don't think FeedLand should call that a change. Wondering what other feed developers do? So I asked ChatGPT. This is incredibly valuable 