Greg Hewgill ([info]ghewgill) wrote,
@ 2006-10-06 22:51:00
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really simple saturation
Ok, that's it. I read a whole bunch of RSS feeds through livejournal's friends page (as you can see by my userinfo), but lately something's been going wrong and regurgitating dozens of old posts from RSS feeds (sometimes months or years old) into my friends page. It's as if LJ forgets which posts have already been seen and fetches a new RSS feed and says hey! all these posts are new. Let's clog up your friends page.

I'm going to switch to Google Reader for non-LJ RSS feeds and see how that goes. I like how you can cherry-pick which things to read without really having to read linearly as you do the LJ friends page.

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LJ RSS feed deja vu
[info]edm
2006-10-06 11:16 am UTC (link)
Yes, that's been bugging me too recently. My suspicion is that they're purging RSS feed posts after, eg, 1-2 weeks, and that a new post after that time causes a new fetch of the feed (since the Modified date changes), which causes all the posts to be parsed and fed back in. I suspect this mainly because it seems to be the periodic posting feeds which are affected; ones that get traffic regularly don't seem to be affected.

Between that and other changes at LJ it's enough to make me wonder if LJ is going to be the best choice of feed aggregator long term.

As for reader, all I want is something approaching the flexbility of a good Usenet reader for my feeds. But alas that doesn't seem to be available, at least at present.

Ewen

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Re: LJ RSS feed deja vu
[info]_fool
2006-10-06 02:13 pm UTC (link)
your analysis doesn't jive with what's happening to me--sometimes i'll just get a rehash of 2-3 posts, sometimes 15 and never all of the past posts. i'd assumed the first time or two that they had just all been edited but now i suspect something lamer, though i can't figure out what. it's happened to maybe 7 of my 56 feeds in the past few months.

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Re: LJ RSS feed deja vu
[info]mskala
2006-10-06 02:26 pm UTC (link)
RSS feed files don't normally contain all past posts, so I wouldn't expect it to show all past posts. What I've seen would be consistent with "If there are no posts in 2 weeks, then when there is one, it'll display all the posts in the RSS file". Often that'll be 15, sometimes more or less depending on how many posts are in the feed file.

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[info]cetan
2006-10-06 02:27 pm UTC (link)
Strange. I'm not seeing any of that behavior with my feed reading via LJ, but then again, I only have a few.

I found Google Reader to be...painful when I tried it last. I've not used it since they launched the new UI. I'd be interested to hear how you find using it.

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[info]leroy_brown242
2006-10-06 04:11 pm UTC (link)
Please, keep us posted on how that goes.

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[info]cowbert
2006-10-06 08:44 pm UTC (link)
I always thought it was a problem with a specific feed (well I only track on regularly; I thought it was a problem with woot.com's feed and not the LJ aggregator).

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