The Early Edition - Problems with most feeds

[drewbwfc]

I downloaded The Early Edition yesterday (a rss reader in the form of a paper for those who haven't seen it) and I seem to be having a few problems with the feeds I want on it. The app looks great with the feeds it suggests, but most feeds I have put on only seem to show the first line of the given article. Is there anyway round this? Am I doing anything wrong? I would be interested to see what other users of this app are finding.

The only feeds I have found so far that show the full articles are the ones from the guardian.co.uk. Everything else is just the first line, ranging from the BBC, Sky Sports, The Sun etc

Very frustrated as this app would be great if I could get it working properly!

 

[steviem]

It depends on the site and how they put their articles into RSS unfortunately. 🙁

Perhaps we should have a list of what RSS feeds have full articles...

 

[drewbwfc]

It depends on the site and how they put their articles into RSS unfortunately. 🙁

Perhaps we should have a list of what RSS feeds have full articles...

Ah that's a shame. A list would be good yeah - I'm after full feeds for tech news, general world news, uk news, football and sport in general.

So far feeds I have that work fully in this app:

- All feeds from The Guardian
- Engadget

That's it 😀 🙁

 

[steviem]

Hmm, could you try this for me:

feed://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/rss

when I click Test Feed it says it's a web page not a feed...

Doi! They change the format on some feeds, so some are feeds. and others are www. 😀

 

[gwynne]

Tuaw's feed is good for apple news, although their stories usually lag a bit behind other outlets. Unfortunately macrumors only gives you the first few sentences. A lot of my favorite sites do that. I assume it's because they went to get you onto the full site and get as many ad views as possible. Sucks because I don't see why they bother to have a feed then.

 

[drewbwfc]

Tuaw's feed is good for apple news, although their stories usually lag a bit behind other outlets. Unfortunately macrumors only gives you the first few sentences. A lot of my favorite sites do that. I assume it's because they went to get you onto the full site and get as many ad views as possible. Sucks because I don't see why they bother to have a feed then.

Yeah guess that will be the reason. Anyway added tuaw cheers. Gonna have a look see if I can find anymore today. Will update with any I find.

Steviem, did u get that rugby one going?

 

[steviem]

Yeah, that started up pretty easily.

I sent an email to them yesterday about a few things and got a reply pretty quickly:

Hi,

Just a quick email to say I really enjoy the app

A couple of things really 'grind my gears' (that episode of Family Guy was awesome by the way) are the following:

- RSS feeds which only display a short summary
- No categories/sections
- duplicate stories, I have guardian.co.uk's UK and US feeds configured and this causes some identical stories to be displayed twice.

I don't think you can do much to fix the first issue, but to have some categorisation would be awesome.

You're doing a great job though!

Steve

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your encouraging feedback. We really appreciate it! 🙂

I think you're going to love version 1.1 because we've implemented feed sections, as per your second point and it's a really nice way of reading feeds, as well as extending the real-life metaphor of a newspaper. This update is currently being reviewed by Apple, so hopefully it will be approved soon.

You're right about the first one. We can only present the content in the feeds and unfortunately some RSS feed publishers choose not to include very much in their feeds, which is why we've included the 'view original' button. I've added your request about duplicate articles to our user suggestion list.

In the meantime, some of the other new features in 1.1 include:
- feed discovery (so you can enter a website URL and the app will search for discoverable feeds)
- feed importing (via Google Reader, OPML and more sample feeds)
- feed groups (so you can categorize your feeds and view them like sections in a traditional newspaper)
- fetching improvements (auto-fetch will only occur if there are no articles in the current day's edition, plus you will be able to stop a fetch)
- saved state (if you exit the app and reopen, it will land on the page you were reading when you left)
- better support for feeds of non-english languages and feeds that caused the app to crash
- plenty more subtle tweaks and bug fixes

Thanks again for sending us your feedback.

Kind regards,
Graham.

PS - If you have a spare moment, it would be great if you could pop are review on the App Store?

Some pretty good features coming through I think, however it's a bummer they can't do much against feeds with little text.. Glad I bought it though.

 

[superflush]

...but most feeds I have put on only seem to show the first line of the given article. Is there anyway round this? Am I doing anything wrong?

This is likely just the way the content provider produces their RSS feeds. For example, Engadget will always have the first entire paragraph of their post in the RSS feed. If the post happens to be particularly long, or have video, pictures, or a press release intact, then you must go to the actual post on the website to view it. So with this type of situation, you can often breeze the most of the posts by staying in your RSS reader and you don't always have to pop into the browser to read it. The New York Times on the other hand, usually has just 2 sentences or so of an article in their RSS feed, so you always most go the article on their website to view it.