RSS Feed keeps reloading trashed items

DEVONthink Tips
1

I have a number of RSS feeds set up in DTP and am having the problem that if I delete read articles they appear again when the feeds are updated. This is really irritating as I am wasting a lot of time constantly deleting feeds I have already read! :frowning:

My feed preferences are set as:

Check for updates every 5 minutes
Remove articles manually
Feed style sheet Default. Css

and I have Skip duplicates checked.

Any help to alleviate this problem would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.

Andrew-Bede

2

DEVONthink Pro doesn’t remember deleted items right now. Therefore the only workarounds are to use either the automatic removal after x days or not to empty the trash.

3

Mmm… rather limits the use for me, are there plans to fix this in the future I wonder? Thanks for the reply though.

4

Not at the moment as DEVONthink is optimized for archiving/storing information. But this might change of course depending on feedback.

However, I’m curious why this is limiting your usage.

5

By way of explanation, imagine it this way: what if your email program, every time you opened it, showed you every email you’ve ever gotten as unread?

The usefulness of DT as an RSS reader is limited if it doesn’t keep track of read items. Maybe this is a feature better suited for DEVONAgent which seems to already have a similar feature?

Regards,
Neil

6

Or, had automatically marked unread messages as read without your permission, is a similar “what if” example. That’s how phpBB2 and other forum software treats unread posts between sessions. It would be intolerable in e-mail clients, i.e. not reading new messages during a current session, with no guarantee they’ll still be marked as unread in the next session.

Not to overgeneralize those cross-app analogies, though. It’s fine if unread posts for certain RSS feeds automatically disappear without my even knowing they existed. But, aside from spam, I never want any unread e-mail messages automatically marked as read or deleted.

Couldn’t agree more, except to expand that to " … read/unread items" (even if it’s implied).

Interesting thought. A bit of somewhat scattershot feedback …

To me DT’s RSS support has never felt like it belonged there. Bluntly, with no developer disrespect intended, the minor modifications it’s gotten since originally posting my opinion years ago seem like lipstick on a pig. Surely RSS in DT has value and purpose for some people; I’m just not one of 'em.

On the surface RSS support seems a better fit for DA, like in Safari and other web-centric browsers. I’d never use Safari as my primary RSS client, but find it useful for about a half dozen feeds. And I’ve got a couple feeds in Mail. NetNewsWire is still the most capable “fire hose” client for me, and it’s remained easier to send articles of interest from NNW to DT for archival than using DT to read/archive them.

I conceptually like the Publication Subscription (PubSub) framework that allows Mail, Safari, and other clients to share feeds, but at least the synching part of the implementation is flakey (between Mail/Safari anyway). Mentioning it here because it could make sense for DA and DT to share feeds if RSS is implemented in both. RSS making the DT 2.0 cut is a sign it’ll be there awhile so making it more compatible with DA seems more likely than it being DA-only any time soon.

It’s tempting to start a simple “Do you use RSS in DT Pro (Office)?” poll since I’m curious what the results would be …

7

I ABSOLUTELY use RSS in DTP2 and value it VERY highly.

It gives me something I always wanted in NNW, but the devs never seemed to care, which is the notion of RSS documents, rather than 800 feeds per app, like I have in NNW. I’m scared to open it during the day because I know what a huge time-sink it will be. With DTP, I can choose just a very few feeds which go on during the day without interrupting the workflow.

DTP handles feed items beautifully IMHO. The key to the read/unread (which works splendidly) is to do this:

  • make a feed folder, populate with feeds
  • outside of that folder, make a new smart group, with unread/‘any content’, and search in your new ‘feeds’ group.
  • then, doubleclick the new smartgroup so that it gets its own window, and you have only unread items from as many feeds as you put in the ‘feeds’ folder.
  • depending on what type of window it is, you either single or doubleclick each item to mark read, or you can multiple-select and mark them read all at once with the kbd shortcut.

I really appreciate the inclusion of the feeds in DTP.

I understand that it might not seem like a ‘fit’, but because so much of the content of some of my db’s come from feeds, it just works terrifically.

It is splendid for things like craigslist items you’re looking for, which just pop up while you’re doing other things.

I’ve tried every other feedreader that I’ve known about and they all fall short in one way or the other, for my needs in unobtrusively integrating fresh items into the daily flow. Many of the others are just dumb.

And those who use a &^%@# browser for feedreading?! Puhleeze. :laughing:

8

Thanks for the DTP RSS opinions and usage tips.

It’s quite convenient for monitoring MacUpdate/VersionTracker feeds, thank you. :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Another tip: Although it’s possible to delete news manually, a better approach might be to simply lock the feeds and/or news you want to keep and let DEVONthink automatically remove the other stuff. At least that’s what I do.

10

Yes Sir, that’s almost exactly what I do as well, except that I just drag ‘keeper’ items to a real storage location and let DTP do it’s own garbage disposal on a 30 day rolling schedule. Another benefit of that is that you have 30 days to ‘rescue’ something that you realize you might want to keep after all.

Cool!

11

@cyol,
many thanks to that “RSS in a box” idea. It works great! Now I can easly search in each RSS using specifc keywords and don’t have to read me through 100 RSS infos.

You made my day! or week!

anjin

12

It’s about time I did something worthwhile. :wink:

I actually have several feedgroup/smartgroup combos set up, with multiple feed windows over on my second monitor, all dimmed using ‘Afloat’.

Now if I could only satisfy my lifelong quest for windows with no scrollbars/window title-bars/chrome that I could make any colour I wanted… kind of like RSS photostickies. wow. :bulb:

13

OH, by the way, you can find the css for the feeds buried somewhere in the package and dupe it and mod it for your tastes. That will probably come out of the package someday? No big deal.

14

Another tip:
there are two ways to look at feeds in Devon. One is to have a single page with all the feeds. How?
For instance you have this feed
feed://www.devon-technologies.com/scrip … um/rss.php
You can choose to have it has a feed (go to Data, New, Feed) and paste the url in the feed box or has a bookmark (go to Data, New, Bookmark) and paste the same url in the bookmark box. I am not sure if I prefer the first approach (wich populates my database with hundreds of items), or the second where I see all the news on one page.
Please share your opinion.
By the way, I mostly use google reader which is fantastic and I am not sure if there is an advantage to use Devon.
Thanks

15

The next beta will support custom stylesheets.

16

Are there any plans to fix this in an upcoming version? I don’t really understand, are my only two options for RSS feeds to either keep everything or let Devonthink delete everything? I can’t think of any feed where I want to keep absolutely every article, but I don’t want everything to be automatically deleted after a certain time period. I want to keep the things that have pertinent information, and delete the rest.

Can I never empty my trash again? Won’t that waste a lot of space on my hard drive?

17

How do you distinguish between the articles that are locked and the hundreds of other articles that are just sitting there waiting to be deleted? Wouldn’t you still need to sift through a month’s worth of news every time you go into it?

If I make a separate folder for each feed and drag the articles I need to keep into the folder, will that save them from being automatically deleted? or will they show up again in the feed as unread if I do that?

18

DEVONthink can remove them automatically, you can remove them manually, you can keep all of them or you just lock interesting news/feeds and let DEVONthink do the rest.

Just lock one and you’ll see :wink:

Yes and yes.

19

Okay, I locked the ones I want to keep. I have 67 items in my feed today, the 5 I locked look exactly the same as the 62 I would like to delete. I understand that they will not be deleted after 30 days (or whatever I set), but it doesn’t make it any easier to distinguish the items that I need to act on from the ones I no longer care about.

Removing manually isn’t really a true option if Devonthink replaces them again every time you remove them.

If I have it set to remove articles after a certain period, does it remove them all, or will it leave the ones I haven’t read? And if I have been away from the computer for longer than the period that is set, will it even fetch the articles older than that period. For example, if I set them to delete after one day and I am offline for three days, will I get the articles from yesterday and the day before?

So, having a folder to move the articles I need to keep will work, except I will just have to read them all twice? Once when they first come in, then again when they come back after I move them?

20

The locked items should have an appropriate additional icon.

Unread items aren’t automatically removed.

Only if the feed is locked.