I’m trying NewsBlur after annoying changes to my prior feed reader. I’ve got my feeds in but I can’t figure out how to filter out the content I don’t want other than the “training” thing. In particular, I want to filter out two things:
– Key words and phrases that don’t appear on the training such as “AWS” and “AZURE” from the HN feed.
– News items where the URL link to a particular web site such as the WSJ and Forbes.
How can I accomplish this is NewsBlur?
So there’s no classifiers for links, but what you can do is thumbs down the entire HN feed and then selectively thumbs up phrases from story titles (“AWS”, “Azure”) as you see them. Alternatively, you can train a story and rewrite the title in the trainer (right-click story title, train it) to include the phrases you want. The trainer is independent of the story, it’s just pre-populated with the story title.
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I think this will give me the opposite of what I want. I’m looking for the outlier news items especially. Since they’re not going to have commonalities, adding common terms won’t include them. In my case, I want to remove the common stuff (AWS and Azure) and leave the edges.
From what I’ve found trying a bunch today there’s only one reader that does have filter capabilities like this. Maybe it’s an opportunity? Or maybe I’m looking for a feature few others care about?
You want an arbitrary input that will let you write in a bunch of phrases and have them surfaced in Focus? Right now you have to do it story-by-story, but I could be convinced to add a freeform input for this sort of work. Where will you get the list of phrases?
The idea is that each feed (and, ideally, each folder) could have a expression: word, wildcards, regex, etc. that could be matched against the title, links, or text of the feed and not display those that match the criteria. The key for me is that this list would exclude not include.
The list would come from me. My seeing news about items I know I won’t read and not wanting those topics to fill up my feed. For example, on /r/programming I know I’m not going to be coding in C++ or Java any time soon so I don’t news items about them to show up. But I do want the offbeat languages to show up. New ones I haven’t heard of too… So I can’t exclude all and add them back in because I wouldn’t know to add “Whiley” or “Intercooler” if they weren’t shown by default.
Edit: Another example is WSJ. I hate it when a WSJ article shows up in HN. I don’t know it’s WSJ by the title so I click on it and run smack into a paywall. I’d rather not know the WSJ article even exists. So I’d need to filter out the URL “*.wsj.com*”
This might be the same I’m looking for. I don’t wanna see posts/feeds with certain keywords / phrases in the title = ability to filter those out /per site.
Example: I have subscribed for new Apkmirror apk posts feed. But I am NOT interested seeing posts that have e.g. “by Samsung Electronics” words in the title (as I apparently don’t have a Samsung phone). So ability to filter out those posts would be a great timesaver for me.
Thx for considering this.
//Timo
You can do this for only the title right now, AFAIK.
Examples:
Open /r/programming feed. Open Intelligence Trainer on an item. You can change the title to be “C++”, select the text, then thumbs-down. Any item in the feed that contains “C++” will no longer show.
Open Apkmirror feed. Open Intelligence Trainer on an item. Change the title to be “by Samsung Electronics”, select the text, then thumbs-down.
If you want to filter out by text inside the story, or links in the story, that does not currently exist. So you can filter out items in HN if the poster was kind enough to use the convention of putting “(Paywall)” or “(NYT)” or “(WSJ)” or etc. at the end of their link. Back in the day, you could do this with Yahoo Pipes, to annotate the feed with your own custom tags or drop items entirely. You could get something like this now with one of the Yahoo Pipes alternatives still kicking around, unless/until it becomes a built-in feature of NewsBlur.
All I can say is: Thank You William! Been using NewsBlur for quite some time and did not realize this!
Can the training be applied across all feeds in my account? I want a common set of keywords filtered out of all. I have nearly 1000 feeds, so doing this on the feed-level would be painstaking.
Global filters have been discussed a few times but the long and short of it is that it would make for a poor UI and needlessly complicate what is already one of the hardest features to masters (training) for a small benefit. And I believe people overestimate the commonality between feeds. Better to train individually and revise individually. That’s what the trainer is so good at, since it’s a single tap on most stories to train and untrain.