Jason Fried points out an interesting idea for an RSS reader: make it group items that link to the same story. This sounded like a simple task for FeedDemon’s XSLT-based newspaper styling – I figured, just use the Muenchian Method to group items that have the same <link>. Problem solved!
Then I remembered that the RSS <link> element is the URL of the item itself rather than the URL of the story being discussed. Oops.
One possible solution is to group items by title, since items that talk about the same thing often have the same title. However, because this isn’t always true, grouping items by title isn’t entirely reliable. (If you’re viewing this in FeedDemon, you can see what I mean by clicking here to apply a newspaper style that groups by title).
What’s really needed is a way to group by the links within each item’s description, but my limited XSLT experience has left me scratching my head over how to do this. So…are there any XSLT gurus out there who want to take a crack at this?