Any way to see only new topics in RSS feed?

Greetings!
I’ve added Tidbits Talk link to my NetNewsWire feeds, in a hope that it will show only new topics as an article when those appear, but right now it considers every new reply in existing topics as a separate article which is odd. Maybe, there are any other RSS feeds on the tidbits.com which would allow me to accomplish what I need?

It’s not possible for the feed to do this - the feed URL doesn’t recompute its contents based on login status.

RSS readers can be configured to only show unread articles, but they will base it on what you’ve read within the reader app, not on what you’ve read through other means.

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The simplest way is to mark everything as read now in your RSS reader, and then all the new articles after that will show as unread.

There’s also a “Today” smartview in NetNewsWire that will only show articles from today. That might help.

I am not sure I understand, how my Tidbits login status (if you meant just that) is related to my question.

The root of the forum (https://talk.tidbits.com/) does not display any answer until you open the article, but these answers are somehow treated by forum engine exactly as new articles and are passed to RSS reader.

This is what I see there just after marking the feed as read some time ago. Two answers to my post, including yours, are displayed as new adjacent articles.

I only see new articles in my RSS feed, not comments. I’m subscribed to:

https:// talk.tidbits. com/latest.rss

(I added spaces so that it wouldn’t auto link). I don’t remember how long I’ve had it this way, but it works with FreshRSS locally hosted, Feedly, and maybe it worked with Google’s RSS reader?

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If I’m reading your original post correctly, you are looking for a way for RSS to feed you only new topics, not every new comment. I note that TidBITS Talk has two RSS feeds:

  • https://talk.tidbits.com/latest.rss
  • https://talk.tidbits.com/posts.rss

I suspect that the “posts” feed includes all topics and comments, and the “latest” feed only includes topics. If I’m reading your issue correctly, you want “latest” but have subscribed to “posts”. Hope this helps.

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Thank you, this is it. I was unable to find the list of RSS feeds, so fed the root URL to NNW, and it defaulted to recent posts, not articles.

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Thanks a lot, this is the answer I looked for. Default feed, as it appears to be, is the second one, as I’ve only pasted the root of the forum into RSS reader.

I must have misunderstood. I assumed that you wanted the RSS feed to only show you articles and comments you have not yet read - which the web site tracks as you view articles.

I see now, after your replies, that when you wrote “new topics”, you meant a feed of top-level topics, not a feed of topics that you haven’t yet read.

The current configuration for the site’s RSS feeds appears to be:

FWIW, I use the Want My RSS extension in Firefox to create an icon in the browser’s location bar whenever there are RSS feeds available. This feature used to be a part of most browsers, but it has gone away and now requires an extension.

Without an extension like this, it can be hard to know what feeds exist for any particular site.

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Ah, I see. That looks normal to me – each response in Tidbits-talk is coming a new post. It sounds like maybe you want all posts to a topic grouped together?

I subscribe to tidbits.com in my RSS, and let Tidbits-Talk come to me via email, so there the responses to each topic are grouped in a conversation in my email, but Tidbits articles show up in my NetNewsWire for easier reading.

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Thank you so much, it really helps. I’ve used to use Firefox built-in RSS reader once it was introduced there, but later switched to standalone clients, there were a few of then since then. And now it is NNW, which is free and great. The only issue is exactly the one you pointed at, i.e., one needs to know the exact URL of the feed, if there are more than one of them available. I was unable to find this list on Tidbits, maybe, I’ve just not looked hard enough.

Yep. Want My RSS is great for detecting when there is a feed, and for showing what the feed currently holds, but it’s a pretty lousy as a reader. But once you see a feed, it can hand the URL off to another reader app/site, which is what I typically do.

I use Feedly, a web-based RSS reader. Mostly because the server will continue pulling and caching articles from a feed even when I’m not reading anything. For some sites (especially news outlets), this is necessary, because they may post articles so fast that new ones drop off the bottom of the feed within an hour or two.

And it lets me read my feeds from any of my several computers without worrying about keeping them synchronized.

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To generalize, I’ve found, apart from really minimalist and unobtrusive ‘Want My RSS” @Shamino advised,

a couple more of similar extensions for Firefox, which also analyze webpages and find the feeds, if any.

Those are “Get RSS Feed URL”

and “RSS Feed Finder”, respectively, which I probably stay with.

Thank you once again, @Shamino.

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The default feed Discourse provides depends on which page URL you give to NetNewsWire. You can give any URL to NNW and it will figure out if there is a feed associated with it. In this case if you click the ‘Latest’ link at the top of the TidBITS Talk homepage and then give that URL to NNW it will find the latest.rss feed that @ron provided. If you give a topic page to NNW it will find the topic-specific feed @Shamino mentioned.

I’ve found this to work on other sites too (e.g. to get a feed for a specific section of a news website).

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