Set feeds to be "inactive"?

DEVONthink Tips
1

Is there a way to set a feed in DT3 as “inactive” so that it will not be checked for new items until you re-enable it?

I’m in a situation where some sites that I get feeds from will occasionally have issues that cause them to be unavailable for days or weeks. I don’t want to continue seeing their error messages in the DT3 log, but I also don’t want to delete the feeds and possibly forget those sites exist.

Thanks!

2

Sorry but there’s current no option to selectively disable a specific feed.

3

Thank you. I hadn’t seen it in the manual or anywhere else, but I figured I’d ask. Appreciated!

4

You’re welcome :slight_smile:

5

DEVONthink’s scripting dictionary includes a refresh command for feeds. So maybe a solution could be to set your RSS preferences to Check for updates: Manually and instead refresh your feeds with a script. You can then exclude the problematic feeds and refresh those manually.

For example, you could use a tag as the search criteria for a smart rule. Then you can easily add/remove feeds from a list of auto-refreshing feeds. Just tested this smart rule on my machine, seems to work fine:

Refresh feeds smart rule script
Refresh feeds smart rule script738×432 54.4 KB

With the following script:

on performSmartRule(theRecords)
	tell application id "DNtp"
		repeat with theRecord in theRecords
			refresh record theRecord
		end repeat
	end tell
end performSmartRule

This doesn’t give you the same granularity of choice in refresh interval – there’s no 5/15/30 minutes option. Don’t know how much that matters to you.

7

This may be more effort than this problem is worth. I think I’m just going to go dirt simple and copy the offending feed addresses into a plain text note and set a recurring reminder on it to re-check them periodically to see if they’ve come back online. There’s nothing mission critical on these feeds; it’s just a matter of convenience. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

2 Likes
8

Do what works best for you. Simple is often good.

I don’t see how this is any big effort, though. I’m a complete beginner with AppleScript and this took me no more than 5 minutes. You only need to set it up once. The smart rule runs the script automatically :slight_smile: Now refreshing your feeds on a schedule is just controlled by applying a tag. It’s just a different default, opt-in vs. opt-out.

You could also make an additional rule refreshing the offending feeds on a weekly basis, so you don’t have to do it manually and forget. At least you only see errors in the log once a week then.

1 Like