Is there anything that can be done to improve the newsblur experience when reading apartment therapy sites? Feedly does it better.

problem
#1

The apartment therapy sites are popular. I follow thekitchn.

As you can see, no preview images, the text version offers no images either. Given its a recipe site, preview images are very important, arguably more important than text. At first I thought it was a rss issue on thekitchn’s side, but then I tried Feedly:

They are doing it better, which means it’s possible. Can newsblur do anything to at least meet the competition?

1 Like
#2

So I spent all day getting to the bottom of this and I’m afraid there’s little I can do about it right now. For the most part, images are extracted just fine, as you can tell from this screenshot. 

What’s happening here is two-fold: 1) Kitchn is not sharing the image in the story itself, so NewsBlur would need to independently fetch this image. Feedly does this, but it’s expensive and is unnecessary most of the time.

  1. This would be corrected automatically by NewsBlur if the image was in the extracted text. But it’s not because it’s being lazy-loaded, which means it’s not technically in the original text. 

Now the good news is that I did make a pretty sweeping change that lets stories that have been read in the Text view by other users to extract the image and use it if possible. So that will pad out more images, but in this case it wouldn’t have worked just because of how the publisher is breaking the images by lazy loading them.

#3

Ok, after I posted that I also fixed up how images are extracted from Kitchn. Since they are published noscript tags, I just extracted the image out of that. It won’t work for others, but it may, and it certainly works on extracting these images (in case hiding lazy loaded images in noscript turns out to be a general practice).