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A major problem with Reuters' RSS feeds while they lasted is that Reuters pushes new URLs with updates to existing stories and kills or redirects the previous U
by bscphil 6y ago
A major problem with Reuters' RSS feeds while they lasted is that Reuters pushes new URLs with updates to existing stories and kills or redirects the previous URLs. So for a major developing story you'd see the same article in your feed 5+ times, since the feed was just a dumb push of every URL added to whatever category you were subscribed to. Still better than nothing, I guess.
The issue with this solution is that there doesn't seem to be any way to specialize it at all. I was subscribed to Reuters' politics feed [1] specifically, and I got other types of news from other sources. But I don't see any way to do that with this method. The articles unfortunately do not have the category in the URL.
[1] http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/PoliticsNews http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/PoliticsNews
- Animats 6y agoPrinting each story exactly once is tough. The RSS feed serial number thing never worked. Sites with multiple RSS servers and a load balancer would return a different serial number. I ended up taking the MD5 of the title and description fields, with HTML markup deleted, and discarding new feed items with a duplicated MD5.
- bscphil 6y agoThat would be a start, but unfortunately Reuters frequently changes their article titles too.