How to remove dates from news feed

[vega07]

I subscribe to 10+ news feeds on calibre and love it. But I have one huge gripe. Calibre automatically adds the date to the titles of all my news feeds (except USA Today). As a result, Kindle does not put old issues into the "Back Issues" folder because it recognizes all issues as a different magazine/newspaper, resulting in pages and pages of old periodicals. How do I remove these dates automatically upon fetching? I opened the recipes with TextEdit (I have a Mac) and added [timefmt = ''] below the description for instance:

class Economist(BasicNewsRecipe):

title = 'The Economist'
timefmt = ''
language = 'en'

__author__ = "Kovid Goyal"
INDEX = 'http://www.economist.com/printedition'
description = ('Global news and current affairs from a European perspective.'
' Needs a subscription from ')+INDEX

However, this does not remove the date.

Can anyone help?

I also have another question. I want to keep only the two most recent issues for each periodical. How do I make calibre or Kindle delete the rest on my Kindle to save space?

Thanks so much in advance.

eta: I zero skills in CSS, or any other script knowledge for that matter. But I am more than willing to learn the basic stuff.

[kovidgoyal]

Add

timefmt = ''

[vega07]

Hi Kovid,

As I said in my original post, I did add that. Am I adding it in the wrong place?

[kovidgoyal]

Are you downloading the custom recipe after customizing?

[vega07]

How do I know if I am? All I am doing is going to calibre in my applications folder, show contents, find economist.recipe, open with textedit, add timefmt = '', save, and then going back to calibre to redownload the issue.

[kovidgoyal]

Change the title as well, that way you know what you're downloading

[vega07]

I don't know what you mean by that. Everytime I download an issue after experimenting with some changes and the date still appears on the title in calibre, I remove it and try again with a different change.

[kovidgoyal]

WHen you make the changes, also change the title in the recipe

[Sridhar]

Kovid,

I was trying the same thing. I tried it out with the wsj.recipe file (for the paid version of the Wall Street Journal). I added the statement you recommended after the title statement. I modified the title statement to say 'The Wall Street Journal - No Dates'.

When I go to the "Schedule News Download" tool, only the original recipe appears in the list., i.e. with the title "The Wall Street Journal". Am I modifying the file in the wrong folder? The folder where I found the wsj.recipe file was in Contents/Resources/resources/recipes after "showing package contents" in the Applications folder (it is on OS-X).

Can you help?

On a side note, I have the same question the original commentator had - is there a way to automatically delete old newspapers/magazines on the Kindle after a scheduled length of time? I know one can automatically delete news from the Calibre library itself after uploading to the Kindle (or after a scheduled length of time) but it would be very useful to delete content on the Kindle itself after some time.

[kovidgoyal]

No there's no way to auto delete from devices (yet). Read the section of the User Manual on adding your own news sources, that explains how to create and use custom recipes (modifying the builtin recipe wont have any effect)

[Sridhar]

OK, thanks.

[Sridhar]

I got this to work. I created a new custom recipe, where I cut and paste the entire recipe from the original. Then I edited the line with the timefmt command. That did not do the trick for the Wall Street Journal. I found that there was another command which set self.timefmt if date was None. I deleted this line altogether. Now I get the Wall Street Journal without the date in the title!