fetched news default author changed with 0.7.0

[artisticforge]

hello;

upon upgrading to 0.7.0 the author and title of fetched news
has changed.

before 0.7.0 the fetched news had the following title and author:

Title Author
The BBC [Sat, 05 Jun, 2010] calibre
The Daily Mail [Sat, 05 Jun, 2010] calibre
Mac World UK [Fri, 04 Jun, 2010] calibre
Mac World UK [Fri, 30 Apr, 2010] calibre

after upgrading to 0.7.0 the fetched news have the following title and author:

Title Author
The BBC Sunday, June 6, 2010
The Daily Mail Sunday, June 6, 2010
Mac World UK Sunday, June 6, 2010

i have taken a screenshot and attached it to this posting.

is there a simple fix to revert to before 0.7.0 behavior?

[kovidgoyal]

This may have been an iPad specific change (i.e. if your output profile is iPad it will do this). Easy to test, simply change your output profile temporarily and download some news

[GRiker]

I am working with iPad-specific handling for recipes, and that looks like the change I've made. May I ask your objection to the new format for author?

G

[artisticforge]

hello;

the old format was easy to find the news article i was seeking by just
looking at the title. having calibre as the author was also a visual clue
to being in the correct location. the sorting on the old format title
listed "The BBC" news in an easily searched list.

the new format in my opinion clutters the author field with many
one-off authors. that is the nature of fetching news from several
locations. it is also harder to locate a particular day of news.

from a logic viewpoint, having a date as the author is illogical.
having calibre as the author by virtue that calibre fetched the
news articles and formatted them for viewing is logical.

part of my objection to the new format is that the format of
the date has also changed.
the old format the date format was "3-letter, day month year"
the new format the date format is "fullday, month day, year"

example:
The BBC [Sat, 05 Jun 2010] calibre
The BBC Sunday, June 06, 2010

the old format required just searching the title column to find the news
article that i was seeking. the new format requires searching the title column
and the author column to find the news article that i am seeking.

to me the date in the title column make more logical sense than the date
in the author column. that is my opinion. opinions are amoral, they are
neither correct or incorrect; right or wrong.

it would be nice to be able to have it configurable so that the end-user
would be able to determine which format they desired/wanted/needed/etc.

[GRiker]

As Kovid points out, for the moment you can simply use a different output format than iPad to get an epub with the old-style author attributes. The reason I'm making the changes is to optimize periodical presentation in iBooks.

I will discuss with Kovid to determine if my optimizations should be associated with a different profile.

G

[GRiker]

Formatting will be restored to original style in 0.7.3 for recipe output in calibre, but modified when sent to the iPad for iBooks.

G