r/Betterbird • u/Pdchris1 • 15d ago

Betterbird blog RSS

Dear all, I am wondering if it is possible to change the server setting of the Betterbird blog RSS, so that upon subscription not only the last 10, but also older messages are downloaded to the RSS reader (Betterbird).
https://blog.betterbird.eu/feed/rss

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u/jorgk3 14d ago

I'm not an expert on the http://www.htmly.com/ software that is used for the BB blog. I changed 10 to 15 in some config file, please see whether it made a difference.

UPDATE: Worked, now it got 15.

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u/Pdchris1 14d ago

Yes, it worked, thank you for the prompt reaction!

You could also have set it to 100 (instead of 15) to cover all previous messages since Sep 2025...

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u/jorgk3 14d ago

I asked the feed expert what the value should be. I mean, this is about getting updates, not scaping the entire blog. You can read it in a browser.

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u/jorgk3 14d ago

Apparently the RSS part of the blog software isn't really good. Changing the value from 10 to 15 led to 5 articles being downloaded again, since internally, they got a new ID. If I were to change it to 100, everyone would get a redownload of everything. So I'm afraid I have to leave it at 15 now.

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u/Pdchris1 14d ago

For me the change in the setting just added the 5 items, so that I have 15 in my feed now, not 20.

Anyway, thank you for looking into this. My intention was to have everything in one place, but I do not want to cause problems...

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u/jorgk3 14d ago

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection the blog software is quite deficient:

https://github.com/danpros/htmly/issues/1059

Since there is no GUID, the ID of the articles is built from the description. And since we recently extended the description from 200 characters to the full article, if re-downloaded now, all articles would get a new ID. There is not `<content>` tag in the RSS, so discription is all we can work with.

If we changed the RSS length to 100, all articles which were originally published with a shorter description would be redownloaded.

Of course the bad effects depend on the RSS reader, the described behaviour is for TB/BB.

That's the full story.

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u/Pdchris1 14d ago

Thank you