How can I subscribe to Daily Kos via Bloglines without seeing duplicate posts?

April 23, 2006 4:38 PM

Bloglines always shows me duplicates of many Daily Kos posts (even though I have "Updated Items" set to "Ignore"). Is there a way that I can work around this, weed the duplicates out somehow? Perhaps using a middle-man of some kind?

Is there a way I can subscribe to Daily Kos via Bloglines without seeing duplicate posts?

I use Bloglines, and I subscribe to the Daily Kos there. Problem is, Bloglines always shows me duplicates of Kos posts. As far as I can tell, I get duplicates of any post that gets updated at any point. If it is updated four times, I get it in my feed four times. So when I go to Bloglines in the morning, it might tell me that Kos has 18 new posts for me to view, when really there are only, say, 10 - but 4 of those are displayed 3 times each.

Now, you're probably thinking that I should go to "Edit Subscription" and change "Updated Items" to "Ignore". Alas, I did that a long time ago, and have double-checked it every so often just on the off-chance it was somehow changed back, but no, it is always set to "Ignore".

I emailed Bloglines, and they said:
We have discovered that if a post's text gets changed from RSS version 1 to RSS version 2 because of a typo or miswording or something of that nature, e.g.

RSS version 1
RSS version 2

This is one thing that will cause a duplicate posting.We have forwarded your information to the appropriate department for further investigation

Well, that's lovely, but that was some time ago, and I'm tired of the duplicates now.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows of or could think of any way around this. Like, could I subscribe to Daily Kos through some middle-man which would weed out the duplicates, and from there into Bloglines?

I suppose a lot of people might be inclined to just suggest another feed reader, and I'm not fully opposed to that, but I have tried quite a lot of them and so far I really prefer Bloglines -- so I'd really rather find a way to keep using Bloglines, just without those darn duplicates!

posted by thatgirl to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Bloglines works like many other readers do -- any time an item changes at all -- even a tiny typo that gets fixed -- you'll see it pop up again as new. There's no workaround at the moment.

Someone needs to create a RSS reader that would check how many characters changed (if less than a sentence was added or edited, ignore) or if it's multi-user like bloglines, let people vote on whether or not an update was worth alerting every other subscriber (and if it gets enough no flags, then pull the updated item from other peoples' feeds).
posted by mathowie at 6:47 PM on April 23, 2006

Does Kos have an Atom feed rather than RSS? The duplicates usually happen when a blog edits a post after it's been published. Since RSS doesn't have a mandatory "entry ID" field that is guaranteed to be unique for each post, Bloglines sometimes has no way to be 100% sure whether it's a new post or a revision of an old one, so to be safe it includes both versions. Atom does have this field, IIRC, so if there's an Atom feed available, try that instead.

Note: This is just what I heard, I'm by no means an RSS expert.
posted by kindall at 6:48 PM on April 23, 2006

RSS may not have a mandatory GUID field, but it does have an optional one since version 2.0. And Kos doesn't use it. Perhaps it would help if they did?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:47 AM on April 24, 2006

Not a suggestion for the original poster, but more a response to Mathowie: NetNewsWire for OS X does check how many characters changed although I don't think it's something accessible in the GUI. This has been a lifesaver for me for those feeds that annoyingly include the current number of comments in the title--I can still get notifications on those feeds for "important" changes while ignoring the constantly incrementing comment info.
posted by bcwinters at 7:37 AM on April 24, 2006

As it so happens, I'm responsible for the well-being of the dkos feeds. I'll look into that GUID field thingy.
posted by Captain_Tenille at 1:01 PM on April 24, 2006

Now that's service.
posted by kindall at 9:38 PM on April 24, 2006

Response by poster: In case anyone ever happens upon this... I don't know if anything was adjusted on DKos' end or not, but Bloglines still suffers from the problem. However, I've discovered that the newly updated Google Reader does NOT show the duplicates! And I like it (hated the old version). Yay!
posted by thatgirl at 10:06 PM on October 9, 2006