You and the Netsute RSS Feed - again

Unlike Google and most other SaaS providers out there in the marketplace - when Netsuite says Beta - they apparently really mean it...  which is all fine and dandy...  but until you understand WHAT the beta limitation is...  well - you know the rule about beta software in production!

Here's the simple deal - the RSS feed works EXACTLY the way you would want it to - and I have already talked about how to leverage the feed generator here.  What I failed to mention (because at the time I was unaware) is the fact that in the current 2009.1 version of the RSS Feed system - every time you add a new entry to the feed - EVERY SINGLE ITEM in the feed gets the new publish time and date.

While that may not sound overly ugly at first - understanding that many RSS readers and consumption engines determine content freshness by date of publish...  well - that makes for a pretty ugly scenario.

For instance - imagine you subscribe to a feed somewhere - like a news site...  and every time there is a breaking headline (or any new headline) added to the feed everything old becomes "new" again...  around the holidays when you have nostalgia for things old yesteryear - maybe that's not all bad...  but in the case of providing a consumable service - it's not good.

So - for now - all my prior recommendations about using the RSS Feed generation tools stand - but I would recomend, until this is out of beta, that you then take the content from the feed - create a flat XML file - and point visitors to your site to THAT content...  then when you have new content - by all means generate the correct XML file within the Netsuite tool - then simply append the new content to the flat XML file to retain all the previous time stamps.