doc/tips/howto_avoid_flooding_aggregators.mdwn



If you have a [[blog]] that is aggregated, either on a site like Planet
Debian, or just through user subscriptions, one common problem is that
changes to the guids of items in the blog can "flood" the aggregator,
causing all recent blog entries to be posted to the top of it.
This can happen in a lot of situations:

Perhaps you've just switched to ikiwiki from some other blog engine and
imported your data.
Perhaps you've turned on the usedirs setting, which changes all the
urls in your wiki. Even if you set up
[[redirections|redirections_for_usedirs]] for the old urls, you still face
the issue of flooding aggregators.
Perhaps you've just moved stuff around in your wiki.

To avoid annoying readers in these situations, it's a good idea to remove
and existing items from your blog's news feed. That way only new items will
show up in the aggregator. The best way to do this is to add a feedpages
parameter to the inline directive for your blog, with a condition such as:
feedpages=created_after(blog/posts/old_post)

Where "old_post" is the name of the last post you made to the blog before
making the change. This will limit the feed to only newer posts, while stil
displaying the old posts in the blog page.