Wired Magazine scheduled news download empty!

[lennyw]

Hi all,

I've been happily using calibre to download Wired Magazine for some time now. A few months ago, I thought I'd noticed that the Calibre version had become smaller/shorter. Now, the last two have come through "empty" (ie cover and date but nothing else).

What's going on?

Thanks, Lenny.

[kovidgoyal]

Presumably the site was updated and the recipe will have to be changed for the new site layout.

[lennyw]

Do I need to post a request for this somewhere, or is this thread enough?

Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

This is enough.

[lennyw]

How long do such recipe changes usually take? How will I know when it has been changed?

Thanks.
(and thanks for the great program!)

[kovidgoyal]

It depends on the author fo the recipe in question. WHen it is fixed it will be announced in the whats new section of the calibre website.

[lennyw]

Thanks! Will keep my fingers crossed that a new Wired feed appears soon.

[kiklop74]

I can fix the recipe to adress the issue of site structural changes but what I can not fix is the lack of articles. As of recent Wired stopped publishing full magazine content online. Only previous issues can be read online in full. I fail to see the point of updating recipe just to download 8-10 articles. If there is still interest for this crippled content I will do an update.

[lennyw]

Dear kiklop74,

Thanks for replying. It would be great if you could solve the issue, even if it is for only a few articles.

A question: is there a way one could write a recipe that would download the articles once they appear on the Wired website, even if they're a month out of date (I'm always behind on my reading, so the up-to-dateness is not so relevant for me).

Looking forward to whatever kind of recipe update you have time to do!

Lenny

[spedinfargo]

Originally Posted by kiklop74

I can fix the recipe to adress the issue of site structural changes but what I can not fix is the lack of articles. As of recent Wired stopped publishing full magazine content online. Only previous issues can be read online in full. I fail to see the point of updating recipe just to download 8-10 articles. If there is still interest for this crippled content I will do an update.

Unfortunately I'm betting that we're going to start seeing more and more of this as magazine publishers are now able to provide better e-versions of the printed magazines for tablets etc. and get people to pay for them...

[mkydgr]

hi lennyw,

I had the same problem, so here is my first attempt at writing calibre recipe (shamelessly ripped off the built-in recipe). Any improvements/suggestions are welcome.
Hope this helps.

BTW, looks like new articles are showing up towards the end of the month, so if you are willing to wait a few weeks longer, you can still get almost a full issue.

[lennyw]

Thanks for the recipe. Will try it out, though it seems that the old recipe is now working again?! It might be, as you say, that I'm now trying to download the stuff later in the month. Either way, I'm glad to be getting it again!

[lennyw]

Back again.

The feed is reporting back with error message in the title, but to re-iterate:
"Failed: Fetch news from Wired Magazine"

Full log in attachment, but the salient lines are probably:
"Python function terminated unexpectedly
No articles found, aborting (Error Code: 1)"

Has been working perfectly until now, have also tried attached version from mkydgr above, but same error comes back.

Any thoughts?

[scissors]

As a tester I tried feed43.

URL http://www.wired.co.uk/news/rss

repeatable pattern
<guid>{%}</guid>{*}</link>{*}<title>{%}</title>

this gave

http://feed43.com/8776136547103340.xml which I put into a basic news recipe

Spoiler:

class AdvancedUserRecipe1357584961(BasicNewsRecipe):
    title          = u'Wired UK new'
    oldest_article = 7
    max_articles_per_feed = 100
    auto_cleanup = True

    feeds          = [
        		(u'News',u'http://feed43.com/8776136547103340.xml')
	        ]

[Websterny]

So http://feed43.com/8776136547103340.xml seems to work quite well, notwithstanding that it may not be the hot-off-the-newstand version. If it is so simple I don't understand the point of leaving a totally non-functional Calibre plugin in the official list. Just modify it with this simple URL, not that the content will be a bit out of date, and move on. Leaving a broken Caliber plugin in the official list is just frustrating for thousands of users and serves no useful purpose. I believe people would prefer to have limited, out of date content to getting an inscrutable error as the current plugin now generates.