When converting an existing blog to ikiwiki it would be useful to be able to preserve any existing UUIDs on posts, in order to avoid flooding aggregators.

Also, it should be possible to change the permalink (the Atom <link>) of a post (e.g. moving the content and leaving a redirector behind), while keeping the same Atom <id> (so that aggregators don't get confused).

Ideally UUIDs for blog posts should be chosen when the post is created, and frozen permanently by checking them in along with the content.

Perhaps ikiwiki's blogging functionality could be hooked up to the meta plugin, with a new meta keyword (uuid? feed-uuid? atom-uuid?) to achieve this.

I've now knocked together a patch, which is in the "force-uuids" branch of git://git.debian.org/git/users/smcv/ikiwiki.git (see also gitweb).

I'm not convinced that "uuid" is the best name for this functionality - the <id> in an Atom feed can be any URI, and one of the use-cases I have for this functionality in my own blog needs to have its <id> set to a URI that is not, in fact, its own address (it was a typo). "id" is a bit arrogant (forcing Atom terminology into a flat namespace!), "atom-id" is slightly misleading because it's also used for RSS... any ideas?

While I was there, I noticed that the quality of the generated Atom/RSS feeds could be improved by making more use of the meta plugin if it's also enabled - would anyone object to me hacking on this some more?

-smcv

merged, thank you!

I chose to use the term guid, since it's both a generic term that fits very well and describes both using a uuid and an url, and also happens to be the term rss uses.

Of course I'm happy if you can improve the feeds. They do already use some meta information (author, copyright). --Joey