I’ve been reading the DT manual, forum posts, and web articles for about an hour, and I still don’t understand WHAT is required to get DT to show me all my RSS feed articles.
I use Reeder on my iPad and it connects to my RSS subscriptions set up on my gmail account. Reeder has no problem pulling in 100s of articles from different feeds. Why can’t DT do this? Why is there a restriction? Where is the global setting for this in DT?
Even if one argues that “most RSS feeds only push X amount of articles, where X is between 0 and 50,” that doesn’t explain why Reeder circumvents such limitation automatically, DT does not, and the DT manual offers no explanation or hack around this.
Feeling very frustrated by this because both DT forum postings and Web blog info is either contradictory or vague; and in any case, I have yet to see a clear explanation and/or an easy solution.
Reeder is easy; it works, and it pulls # of articles without any cap. I want this in the DT reader. How do I get it?
If DT does NOT do this, just tell me in the manual and all other DT KB areas straight out: i.e., “DT has an RSS reader, but it will never give you more than 40 articles per feed.”
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
First, let me say that I have no clue how the push of RSS feeds works in any application, but as a point of discussion it appears that you are comparing the number of articles that Google Reader/Reeder has aggregated over time in your established account vs. the number of articles that DEVONthink downloads when creating a new feed. I could be mistaken, but I expect that this comparison is not apples to apples. If I have a feed in Google Reader/Reeder, then yes, over time it will accumulate 100s of articles. However, if I create a new feed in Google Reader/Reeder, it will only give me a limited number of articles to start, as is also the case when creating a new feed in DEVONthink.
As an example, you just mentioned in another post that you have almost 600 unread LifeHacker articles in your Google Reader/Reeder account, but a new feed in DEVONthink only gives you 25 articles. I do not subscribe to the LifeHacker RSS feeds anywhere, so I just created a new feed in Google Reader/Reeder and a new feed in DEVONthink. Like you, I have 25 new feeds in the DEVONthink feed, however Google Reader/Reeder only gave me 10 articles. I don’t know of any way to load additional articles in Google Reader/Reeder-is there a way to do this? If not, isn’t DEVONthink behaving just as would Google Reader/Reeder when a new feed is created?
These are all excellent questions and helpful for further troubleshooting. Thank you for taking some time to run a few tests and shed some light on this. The Apples vs. Oranges analogy is apt; and I think you’re also on to something significant in suggesting that the larger number of articles in my Google Reader(s) is a number that has accumulated (aggregated) over time.
As you may suspect, I am loathe to delete my subscriptions in Google and then recreate them in DT; I don’t want to lose all those unread articles!
A better test might be to subscribe to a brand new RSS feed in DT that pushes a huge number of articles an hour, and see how many articles DT will accumulate. I think I will try that next.
I’m still researching this, and I just keep hitting wall after wall. For the last half hour I haven’t been able to get DT to accept the creation of any RSS feed whatsoever.
Perhaps I will just have to live with the fact that this particular component of DT is feature-poor and extremely difficult to configure.
As a FYI, I have feeds in Google Reader that are strictly for entertainment consumption and I have feeds in DEVONthink that pertain to my areas of research, so I want to be able to archive them permanently. For a long time, I’d say well over a year, I maintained these research feeds in both Google Reader and in DEVONthink just to ensure that feeds in DEVONthink were reliable and effective for my workflow. I never had a problem with the feeds in DEVONthink and in time, I started deleting them out of Google Reader. Perhaps a similar trial will work for you to see if you want to work with RSS feeds in DEVONthink. Oh, and for the occasional feed in Google Reader that I want to add to DEVONthink, I send the article to Instapaper or Pocket where I subscribe to my Instapaper and Pocket feeds in DEVONthink. Good luck!
What a website that publishes a feed does, and what a feed reader does are two different things. The website publishes an XML file that contains links to “x” number of articles – usually something like the 15 or 25 most recent articles. The XML is the basis for the RSS feed. The publisher usually updates the XML regularly (daily) and drops off the older items and adds the newest items, to keep the number of items on the list to the size it decided to use. The feed reader (Google, etc.) collects current links, but doesn’t delete older links unless or until configured to do so.
If you want to download your history from Google Reader, you can use this link:
the “?n=1000” element means the link will grab the most recent 1,000 LifeHacker articles that I’ve stored in Google Reader. You can change “n” to suite you.
In my case, I’ve defined DEVONagent as the destination for these downloads, from which I can shoot them over to DEVONthink or elsewhere.
As you mentioned “Lifehack” in another thread: I subscribed to their feed in June 2012. Between 25.07.2012 and 19.12. I have collected some 400 articles (I have deleted some other hundreds in that time) and I have another 400 articles from today dating back to 19.12.2012, for this period the history should be complete.
If you do not manage to transfer your feeds from your reader to DEVONthink, send me a message and I could send you a Dt-database containing these 819 feeds.
