Pressing "enter" to open the current item in story view sometimes doesn't work (ditto for the "shift-enter" text view shortcut)

problem
#1

Sometimes when I am viewing an item in the feed view and want to open it up in the story view, it seems like the keyboard shortcut (the enter key) just doesn’t register. There’s no feedback telling me, for example, “the item cannot be loaded in Story View”. I think this may be because of the iframe issue you’ve mentioned in another thread - where a site cannot be loaded in story view - but there’s no indication that this is the case, so it just seems like my keystrokes are disappearing into thin air. Important note: if I use the mouse or the right-arrow to get the whole stream in story view, the item opens fine in story view. So it’s not that Newsblur is incapable of loading it.

I’m also having this problem with the text view shortcut (shift-enter) at times, and my guess is that it means that the text parser is blocked/broken for that site (or item) - but, again, there’s no feedback I can see to let me know that.

Obviously, the best case scenario would be that these shortcuts would always work, but the second-best scenario would be that I at least get an indication that the site has received the key press, and simply can’t do what I’m asking it to do.

Here are some examples from today:

Deadspin - site URL http://deadspin.com/was-baseball-more…, via my “all stories” feed (https://newsblur.com/folder/everything):
Pressing “enter” gets no feedback. “Shift-enter” works fine. When I click into the site-specific stream (https://newsblur.com/site/2236888/dea…) I see that Story View is greyed out (presumably because of the iframe issue?).

Deadspin - site URL http://deadspin.com/derek-jeter-is-ba…, via my “all stories” feed (https://newsblur.com/folder/everything): Pressing “enter” gets no feedback. “Shift-enter” works fine. But here’s the really odd thing (that I forgot to test on the example above): if I use the mouse and click on “Story”, the item loads fine in story view. It’s just the keyboard shortcut (or the “open in story view” feature, rather than load the entire stream in story view) that doesn’t work.

Washington Post - site URL http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/n… (via the Nationals Journal feed - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/n…): same story as the example above - “enter” broken, “shift-enter” works, clicking “Story” works.

Vulture - site URL http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nymag/… (redirects to http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/watch-…) (via the Vulture feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/nymag/vul…): “enter” broken with no feedback, “shift-enter” successfully gets the green arrows indicating “open in text view” but I get “SORRY, THE STORY’S TEXT COULD NOT BE EXTRACTED”, clicking “Story” works. Clicking “Text” gets no error message but the same result (can’t load the text).

Boing Boing - site URL http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingb… (redirects to http://boingboing.net/2013/07/11/hand…): “enter” works, “shift-enter” successfully gets the green arrows indicating “open in text view” but I get “SORRY, THE STORY’S TEXT COULD NOT BE EXTRACTED”, clicking “Story” works. Clicking “Text” gets no error message but the same result (can’t load the text).

Boing Boing - site URL http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingb… (redirects to http://boingboing.net/2013/07/11/to-d…): Everything works fine, including the text view.

1 Like
#2

Screenshots don’t really work for most of these (because all it shows is the regular screen, seemingly working, because it ignored my keypress), but here’s what the Vulture error looks like when I press “shift-enter”:

#3

And here’s Deadspin open in Story view:

#4

Next time this happens, try clicking (bringing focus to) some small area of NewsBlur that does nothing, like the middle space on a toolbar between buttons. That just makes your browser give keyboard focus to NewsBlur. Then try hitting enter/shift+enter again. I have a feeling focus has been lost. Because no matter what, NewsBlur will strafe you into one of those two views, even if they don’t work. Well, only if they are enabled, but that’s shown at the top left by greying out the Story view (but never the Text view).

#5

Thanks for the reply, Sam. Just tried that on another Vulture item. Shift-enter worked (and it successfully parsed the text - unlike other Vulture items like the one in my example above), but Enter still has no feedback at all (I tried it directly and after successfully pressing Shift-enter to confirm I had focus. Again, pressing the right arrow twice to change the view for the full stream worked fine and loaded the item story view.

In other words, other keys are registering so I know it’s not a focus issue - it’s just this particular shortcut that isn’t working.

#6

Instead of site URLs, can you provide a sample NewsBlur.com url?

#7

Well, I’m generally viewing these in the “All Site Stories” stream (https://newsblur.com/folder/everything) - that’s how I almost always go through my items. I don’t recall whether I’ve had this particular issue in specific feed views (though I’ll keep an eye out for it now).

As I noted above for Deadspin, the stream for the Vulture feed (https://newsblur.com/site/1204/vulture) has the story view greyed out (and so of course the “Enter” shortcut doesn’t work). But items from both of those feeds *do* load fine in the All Site Stories stream in the story view - I just have to load it up manually rather than via the one-off keyboard shortcut.

#8

Here are the newsblur URLs for the other feeds I mentioned:
Boing Boing: https://newsblur.com/site/526/boing-b…
Nationals Journal: https://newsblur.com/site/2410875/nat…
Deadspin: https://newsblur.com/site/2236888/dea…

#9

So I’m able to read the Text view for the Vulture feed, but the Story tab is disabled. Remember, it’s disabled by the publisher, so the fact that it works in All Site Stories is a bug that I need to address. I plan to fix it … though I’m not sure that’s the resolution you want.

#10

True, that’s not exactly what I’m looking for! (As an aside, it seems crazy to me for a publisher to want to block story view, which actually displays their ads and displays content the way they format it.)

Anyway, my main point is just that it is a little frustrating when a shortcut has no effect - even if all it does is pop up a message saying “Story View is unavailable for this item” I would at least know to stop trying. But getting an explanation for what’s going on is helpful even if you don’t end up changing anything here.

Thanks for the responses, appreciate the info.