Greetings. Not sure how Newsblur intends to behave in this situation, I’m only familiar with what Google Reader thinks is the “right” way [1]. If a feed item is updated, such as the title, or all parts of the item being blanked out entirely and marked “stale” (but retaining the same GUID), should that be updated in the Newsblur feed? At the moment I’m not seeing any updates at all to an item after it is originally added.
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I think updating feed items would be a nice feature.
Yeah, stories are definitely updated. See that little Page with Angle Brackets icon in the top right of a story? Click that to see the changes to the story. Additionally, you can also set a preference to have changes always visible.
NewsBlur goes a bit further than just checking the GUID. Even if the GUID changes, NewsBlur does a search of the last N stories (N being the number of stories in the RSS XML) and checks if there is a > 90% similarity in text. This is only if the GUID is different, but the story may just have been republished slightly differently, since stories don’t get deleted from NewsBlur once they’re published.
Updating stories, especially with the track changes preference, is a foundational characteristic of a good reading experience. I made sure to get that in early.
Now, if there’s a dupe problem, then I want to hear about it. I’m full-time now, so I’ve got some free cycles to fix any bugs like that.
Weird, doesn’t seem to be working for one of my feeds, then. I’ve tried both the “show changes” option and the “show only current version,” and both are out of date and/or never updated.
The feed in question is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/hntop10ro…
Consider the current top item “Blizzard lays of 600…”. It still shows a body with “165 points 102 Comments”, even after a forced refresh, whereas the feed itself shows “175 points 104 Comments.” Obviously those numbers aren’t a big deal, but other items never have their title updated, etc.
Another example in that same feed, the raw feed shows an item with a title of:
“Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign registrar”
while Newsblur shows the old title:
“All .com domains now subject to US Law”
Ah-ha, a Hacker News feeds is made of 100% pure exception-to-the-rule. They have such high volume that I’m often not able to find the original story very easily. There is certainly a bug here in how I’m handling it, but it’s because Hacker News feeds are all over the place.
It’s in my wish-list of bugs to fix, but it’s not the highest priority. The real issue is that I am already grabbing N stories, but this particular story is not one of those N, so I can’t update it, even though I am trying to find that story explicitly. There’s the bug, but I’m not sure I can fix it without a major re-write of the feed fetcher, something I have slated for post-social.
Came back to try Newsblur after a year due to some Google Reader wonkiness in the past couple days. Just a heads up that feed items that are updated (but retain the same GUID) are not updated correctly in Newsblur.
These type of updates are handle correctly by Google Reader and Netvibes, if that helps.
Google Reader, in particular, offers this advice (see bullet #4):
http://support.google.com/reader/answ…
Perhaps Newsblur’s tracking is not done via GUID on RSS 2.0, and that’s why I see the discrepancy.