Eliminate duplicate stories?

Suppose you subscribe to two or more feeds from the same news source. Sometimes a story appears in two or three of those feeds. For example, often the NY Times includes a story in both the Business and Technology feeds.

With this new feature, NewsRiver keeps track of the story titles; if a title appears again, the story won't be included on the News page. However, if two (different) stories have exactly the same title, you will only see one, the one it discovered most recently.

It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good way of keeping the duplication down.

How To

1. Choose Get Latest Code from the NewsRiver menu to get the latest features and fixes.

2. Choose Preferences from the NewsRiver menu, and then choose the Eliminate duplicate stories? option. It's turned off by default. Screen shot.

3. Check the box if you want duplicates to be eliminated, unchecked if you want to see all the stories, even duplicates.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/26/06; 10:46:52 PM - --

Goodbye annoying "web bugs!"

I'm getting a new release of NewsRiver ready to go. It includes some of the features I added in order to get the NY Times and BBC rivers going. So this is the first of several notes I'll write in the coming days.

First the story of how this feature came to be. At last year's Gnomedex, I met Brad Feld, who is the lead investor in Feedburner and NewsGator, two companies that are building on RSS technology. I suggested they offer a service where we could pay them to provide feeds without the web bugs they use to gather statistics. I find them intrusive and distracting. He asked a strange question -- why don't I strip them out? I offered: Why should I have to do work to undo the work you did to put them in, when they weren't there in the first place?

A year later, the bugs are still there, and they are still annoying. When I found myself hosting Steve Rubel's mobile page, I thought this is over the line, I am now paying to promote Feedburner. I feel I've already given them enough, so I wrote the code that Feld suggested, it strips out the bugs, and now you have it too.

How To

Choose Preferences from the NewsRiver menu, and then choose the Annoying "web bugs" option. The option is off by default. Screen shot. Check the box and click Submit and the bugs are history.

Comments are turned off

I had to turn off comments on all my Manila sites, they were getting hammered by spammers. Fighting them had turned into a full-time job (and severely hurt performance on a bunch of the sites I host for other people). For now, use my WordPress "annex" site for comments, the link is on Scripting News in the right margin. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we're still diggin!

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/26/06; 3:43:26 PM - --