Ticket #111 (closed enhancement: fixed)

Opened 2 years ago

Last modified 2 years ago

Timestamps for feeds that don't provide them

Reported by: kivle Assigned to: fox
Priority: wishlist Milestone: 1.2.4
Component: backend Version:
Keywords: Cc:

Description

Sadly a lot of feeds don't provide timestamps for news items. That leads to ttrss displaying them as "1/1/1970 00:00:00" and the like, which is a pain for feeds that posts maybe 100 news items per day. A lot of norwegian news papers are like this, and since the news titles appear in random chronological order (since all timestamps are identical), it's impossible to say if a news item is 30 minutes old, or maybe 24 hours old.

Could it be possible, as an optional per feed option, to add the possibility to replace the timestamp with the update time for feeds like these? Maybe just a check box that says something like, use update time as news item timestamp?

Change History

09/14/06 15:09:15 changed by trac-user

  • priority changed from major to wishlist.

09/14/06 15:16:55 changed by fox

  • status changed from new to assigned.
  • milestone set to 1.2.3.

That is weird, I was under the impression that if no timestamp is given, local time on the moment of import was assumed. Maybe I broke something.

09/14/06 15:37:25 changed by fox

My test feed w/o pubDates imported fine (with current time):

http://madoka.spb.ru/~fox/unsorted/test_feed_nodate.xml

Could you provide an example of feed with 1/1/1970 dates?

09/14/06 18:39:38 changed by trac-user

http://www.vg.no/export/Alle/rdf.hbs

This one gives me 01/01/1970. Looking more at the source code of it, I see that it does indeed provide timestamps. Maybe the date format they use is invalid, and not understood by Magpie? Other examples are these:

http://www.dagbladet.no/rss/oppdatert.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalPhotographyBlog (gives a 1969 date instead, probably because of timezones) http://world-history-blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

These use the same time format. So I guess, maybe I should change this request to, "use update time as post time for feeds that provide a timestamp magpie doesn't understand". :)

09/15/06 11:29:06 changed by fox

Hmm, first and last feeds imported fine for me. There was a recent fix for w3cdtf parsing which those feeds use (check the tracker), this can fix this for you.

09/18/06 12:53:01 changed by kivle

I've tested this some more now over the weekend, and it seems that the w3cdtf bugfix cleared out most problems. There's still a couple of feeds that have problems though. One of them is this one:

http://web3.aftenbladet.no/rss/

09/19/06 11:55:48 changed by fox

This feed actually imported fine for me too. Maybe it got stuck in magpie cache (it stores already parsed feeds).

09/19/06 14:23:07 changed by kivle

Hmm, that definitely sounds like a likely explanation. I'll flush the cache when I get back home from work. As it stands now, it looks like this ticket really was a dupe of ticket #110. Thanks a lot for your help. :)

09/20/06 11:32:54 changed by fox

  • milestone changed from 1.2.3 to 1.2.4.

09/20/06 16:29:21 changed by trac-user

Ok, I tried to flush the cache now. It looks like most of the problems have been resolved. The only feed that still has problems is this one:

http://web3.aftenbladet.no/rss/

All other feeds work now. What's a bit strange is that the feed that still has problems do have random items that get's parsed correctly though. I get maybe one or two news items with correct dates per update, while the rest get the usual 1969 dates. It must be this particular news papers feed that is buggy.

10/19/06 11:38:14 changed by fox

  • status changed from assigned to closed.
  • resolution set to fixed.

Allright, I think this can be considered mostly fixed. :)