Purging (removing, deleting) old news from Calibre and Device

[bjmckenz]

I've been using Calibre for a month or two with a Kindle. It's a great program, but I don't know how to do things that I would expect.

I use the K for reading papers, magazines, and blogs primarily. I never read directly in Calibre except to check formatting.

How can I direct Calibre to only keep (say) 7 days of the WSJ? I set "Delete downloaded news older than 7 days" for all my feeds, (but take the Wall Street Journal [paid] as an example) and when I do a "Download now" I see no evidence that it's deleting the old(er) ones from Calibre. Perhaps the fact that I just changed the "after..." from its default? Does it only apply going forward?

Second and related:

Is there a way to keep my Kindle mirroring my library? That is, deleting an item in the library deletes it on the device? I realize that this may not be something that everyone wants, but I have (effectively) one library and one reader...and I want them to stay synced. How do I do that, if it's possible?

Thanks much.

[GRiker]

Originally Posted by bjmckenz

How can I direct Calibre to only keep (say) 7 days of the WSJ? I set "Delete downloaded news older than 7 days" for all my feeds, (but take the Wall Street Journal [paid] as an example) and when I do a "Download now" I see no evidence that it's deleting the old(er) ones from Calibre. Perhaps the fact that I just changed the "after..." from its default? Does it only apply going forward?

The Kindle will automatically keep the last 7 copies of a periodical, deleting older ones. In order to take advantage of this, you need to have the statement

timefmt = ''

in the recipe (That's two single quote/apostrophe characters, with nothing between). If you're using the stock WSJ recipe, follow these steps:

• Click Fetch News↓Add a custom news source
• Click Customize builtin recipe
• Click the drop-down list, then locate the recipe you want to customize. (You can accelerate the search by typing the first few letters of the recipe)
• In the Available user recipes list, select the recipe you chose to customize.
• In the Recipe source code window, find the line starting with 'timefmt ='
• Delete everything between the quote marks as shown above.
• Click Add/Update recipe
• Click Close

To run your modified recipe, click Fetch news, then select your customized recipe from the Custom list, download as usual.

You should delete the older copies on your Kindle, because those won't be managed by the Kindle, only the ones created by the customized recipe.

With respect to syncing Kindle + Calibre, that's a feature on the horizon. In the meantime, you need to do it manually.

Hope that helps.

G

[bjmckenz]

Yep, that stripped the date from the downloads. Thank you.

[bjmckenz]

OK, so now it's not downloading as scheduled. (0.45/0.46). If I manually fetch, it comes down, but it's been a couple of days and nothing automatic happened (specific case: WSJ paid, but I have a dozen [Dilbert, Onion, Salon, BigGovernment...]).

They are showing up correctly in the Scheduled News Download area under Custom.

Any thoughts?

[bjmckenz]

More. The entries say "downloade 0 days, 5 hours, 15 minutes ago" (or whatever) as you expect. But when I manually download one (Joel On Software) it downloads it (shows up in the list) then deletes it from the list (library). Weird.

My library has only books -- no more downloaded news.

[GRiker]

Scheduled downloads I'm not familiar with, perhaps Kovid can answer that one.

G

[kovidgoyal]

What have you set the delete downloaded news setting to?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by bjmckenz

More. The entries say "downloade 0 days, 5 hours, 15 minutes ago" (or whatever) as you expect. But when I manually download one (Joel On Software) it downloads it (shows up in the list) then deletes it from the list (library). Weird.

My library has only books -- no more downloaded news.

When you downloaded this was your Kindle hooked up? Could the file have immediately transferred to your Kindle then have been deleted from Calibre? The only time I know that Calibre deletes items is if you selected the option in Calibre to delete it on transfer.

I understand that news downloads are now handled as subscriptions on the Kindle. So your news might be in a new place on your Kindle.

Update: I just downloaded a news item and it didn't delete. It will when I transfer it to my reader.

[bjmckenz]

I had it set to 7 days. I have changed it to 0 days. We shall see if that makes a difference.

(yes, my K was hooked up)

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by bjmckenz

I had it set to 7 days. I have changed it to 0 days. We shall see if that makes a difference.

(yes, my K was hooked up)

I don't know anything about the Kindle, did you find where your news went to? Were they transferred to your Kindle into the some area other then where you were use to? Does the quote (from another thread) below describe anything that might be affecting you?

Originally Posted by GRiker

Here's a list of Kindle-specific enhancements in 0.6.46:

• Send to device↓Fetch annotations:
  • Archives 'My Clippings.txt' in the calibre database, which can be opened on your computer.
  • Automatically tags a book as read if last read location > 96%
  • See this thread for more info about Fetch Annotations
• Tagging a book with [PDOC] changes the cdeType to PDOC, causing the book to be listed in Personal Docs rather than Books. You may choose a different tag for this function in Preferences|Conversion|MOBI|Personal Doc tag.
• All periodicals generated by calibre are now managed by the Kindle such that the previous 7 issues are kept in the Periodicals: Back Issues listing on the Home page. Issues > 7 are deleted automatically. Individual issues may be kept using the Kindle's Keep This Issue command.

G

[mik991]

Hi,

I am having a similar issue. I just bought a nook and love the features that calibre offers to make it that much better.

With my news feeds I have already customized them with the timefmt = '' fix, which eliminates the name from being something like "Newsweek [Mon, 24 May 2010]", instead now it would read "Newsweek".

The issue however is in the filename, which reads "Newsweek_2010-5-24" no matter what.

Is there a way to adjust the file naming for news like there already is for books?

If not does anyone have any other solution to replace old news on a device with the new?

Thanks!

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by mik991

Is there a way to adjust the file naming for news like there already is for books?

If not does anyone have any other solution to replace old news on a device with the new?

You might get a better response asking this in the Custom Recipe sticky thread. More qualified folk will be viewing that thread.

This thread was Kindle specific.

[kovidgoyal]

No you can't adjust the filenames for news files. Eventually calibre will be able to delete news files from the device automatically when you connect it, but not at the moment.

[mik991]

Thank you.