404Media feed; items have description, content; only description shows

problem
1

I have a subscriber-only feed to 404 Media. Lately, NewsBlur hasn’t been showing the full article content, just a teaser for each article.

I did some tinkering–made a copy of the feed, editing it in a text editor, seeing what happened–and figured out: in each item, they have a description with a teaser and they have a content:encoded with the full article content. NewsBlur shows the description, but not the content, alas.

I got rid of the description (well, I went in with my text editor and changed description to loldescription), and pointed NewsBlur at the result: it successfully showed the article content!

I dunno enough about RSS to know whether the smart thing to do is for NewsBlur show both-description-and-content instead of just one; or if the 404 Media folks should omit the description field from each item (but the RSS spec makes me think it’s required? (but maybe it’s a loosey-goosey spec, since it doesn’t seem to mention content at all but lots of feeds use it? oy))

I’d rather not share the URL of my feed here in this public forum, since it’s a seekrit subscriber-only feed. But if some official support-y person needs it and has a private way for me to send it, let me know.

2

I’ve been noticing the same thing, starting on or about 4/15 - and after contacting 404 Media, they’re not aware of any changes on their end. The non-subscriber feed does still work, and the structure appears to be similar?

3

DM me the url and I’d be happy to take a look!

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4

D’oh. Yep. I thought that getting rid of the description tag was the magic fix, but it was just the last of several tweaks I tried.

5

Tracked this down. The issue is on our end, not the feed.

404media’s RSS (Ghost 6.34) ships a media:content with a plain-text media:description alongside content:encoded. feedparser merges those into a single entry.content list, with the short caption at index 0 and the real article body at index 1. NewsBlur’s old logic grabbed index 0, found it shorter than the , and fell back to the description. The full body got dropped.

Fix is in: prefer text/html content, fall back to the longest. Now new stories will come through with the full body, and existing truncated stories will fill in on their next refetch. Deployed.

BTW, if you insta-fetch (shift+r) on the feed, the full stories should come in, though only 3 at a time, so feel free to insta-fetch a few times to fill it out retroactively.

2 Likes
6

YAY, thank you!

1 Like