How to mark "seen" RSS entries?

Question

So I have played with the idea of making a specialized RSS-reader for some time now, but I have never gotten around to it. I have several project that could benefit from reading feeds in one way or another.

One project for this is an RSS-bot for an IRC-channel I'm on. But I havent quite wrapped my mind around how I can "mark as read" a story, so that it doesn't spit out all the stories in the feed everytime it runs.

Now, I haven't read the specs extencively yet either, so there might be some kind of unique ID I could use to mark the entry as read using a database of some kind. But is this the right way to do it?

Answer 1

From reading the specs for RSS 2.0 at ttp://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt it seems each item has a GUID which you can use to know which articles have been read or not.