Detecting new new items in a RSS feed

atom-feed, feed, rss, xml

Solution

Each item in RSS 2 and Atom has a GUID/ID that may be flagged as unique. If it's flagged as unique you can use it to identify items and match against the previous items.

Problem

What is the best way to detect when a feed has been updated? Say I have an application which polls the feed every 15 minutes. How do I find out if new content has been added or not? For RSS as well as Atom feeds.

Original source