#11 Sort Items By Time, Not By Source

[James Damour]

OK, so according to this blog post
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/04/23#When:7:4
4:43PM Radio Userland defaults to ordering items by
publication date (the pubDate element in RSS v2.0) and
not by source of the post. It would be neat if
AmphetaDesk would have this option as well. I don't
need it to be on by default, just available.

Thank you.

[Morbus Iff]

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It's a nice idea, but that'd only work for feeds that
actually include that information (all versions of RSS
support the date field, but only about 50% of feeds actually
use it). Sorting this way starts catering to "good" and
"bad" feeds - all the "good" feeds would be sorted first,
showing at the top of the page. All the bad feeds would be
stuck at the bottom of the list, giving the impression that
they haven't been updated, even though they really have.
Suddenly, it becomes "AmphetaDesk doesn't sort feeds the
right way!" instead of "the RSS feed didn't have the timestamp".

[James Damour]

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That's true. We can ameliorate the problem a bit if the option
is off by default, and if the documentation for the option
mentions the problem. There's no guarantee that the users
will READ the documentation, but that's the cross borne by
developers everywhere.

Furthermore, by notifying users that some of the feeds aren't
including the publication date, they can contact the feed's
source and suggest that they start using the feature. Like all
things web-related, I expect that sites will rapidly evolve their
RDF/RSS to meet their user's needs.

Also, if you really REALLY care, contact Dave Winer (the
author of the blog) and Andrew Grumet (the MIT developer
mentioned in the blog) and find out how *they* handle
the "good feed/bad feed" problem.

[Len Lattanzi]

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I just keep a copy of the previous download and if the new content is not significantly
different regardless of pubdate then the feed is considered not to have changed.
It does force all old feeds to get downloaded at every scan...

[Harold Martin]

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I'll second this request.
I need this feature.

Harold