Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnonHP | Hacker News Reader

Tangential question, since I use feeds but am not an expert in this: why do some feeds lose the articles after sometime while others don’t?

Say I have two feeds from two different sites. The newsreader shows only the most recent (10 or 20 or whatever) articles for one feed whereas it shows all the articles from the time I subscribed to that feed for the second one. I know that the feed XML itself contains only a limited number of articles in both the cases whenever the reader requests for a refresh.

How can I make sure that the newsreader preserves (does not purge) the older articles in the first case above (I use NetNewsWire on macOS and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows)?

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That'd be a per Reader, per Feed "Max Entries to Save" setting - which may have default values that differ from reader to reader, from "feed collection" to "feed collection" (if you create tree heirarchies in your reader) and might (I don't recall) have default values (unless over ridden in reader) from individual feed values.

It's all very implementaton dependant.

I mainly use FeedBro as a browser extension - everything is a per feed value that can be set to over ride FeedBro defaults ; in FeedBro I can bundle all different news sites (BBC, ABC(AU), Fox, CNN, etc) rss feeds under a "News" heading but cannot set a single Max Entries value that is applied to all the sub feeds - other implementations (different readers) can.

Well, to answer your initial question, RSS is XML, meaning for the most part it relies on serving the entire document every time to create a valid feed file. As such, as the number of articles grows, every request for the feed grows in size. So clipping it to the latest stuff helps relieve load on the server.

RSS is also commonly used to serve podcasts, and I've been told by a number of podcast hists that they like this because it prevents someone from sticking the RSS in their podcatcher and blasting the server with requests for every episode all at once.

I'm guessing that a lot of RSS generators have this as a default, and many of the people with their RSS set up like this simply never change the default.

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