Wall Street Journal Recipe Quality?

[rhsanborn]

I'm considering paying for a WSJ subscription for viewing on my PRS-505. I was hoping someone could confirm the quality of the WSJ recipe first though. Does it generally catch most or all of the articles? Is it reasonably easy to navigate?

I'm reasonably adept technically, and so may be able to help maintain/refine this if it needs work or something, but I wanted to make sure it was worthwhile to start.

[ddavtian]

The built-in receipt is good but it's not capturing all the articles from daily paper.
I've attached a version that I use. It's getting all articles from "Today's paper", it's not organized nicely by sections, just one article after another.

I usually use scrapbook to get all articles on my computer, then use the command line to create lrf. Scrapbook takes around 5-6 minutes to get the whole paper, then feeds2lrf is very fast, less than a minute. You can try to create lrf directly from web, it was sometimes timing out for me, some articles were coming empty.

I have yesterday's paper version, it's around 6Mb (built-in receipt is around 9-10 Mb). I'll see if I can attach it here for you. If not then I can email it to you, if interested.

If you can improve the attached receipt, share it back. I was good enough just to make it work :-)
I do get paper copy every day, but barely touch it. This version on Sony has completely replaced the hard copy for me.

David

[rhsanborn]

Your recipe just tipped me in favor of paying for a subscription, thank you. I've had the habit of buying the paper version and I very much wanted to replace it with something on my reader. I'll work on possibly getting it organized by subject or section, and I'll post any updates. Thank you very much.

[ddavtian]

Glad you found it helpful. I cannot take a credit, copied code from different receipts and attached to each other :-)
It's only few minutes of wait every morning (I'm sure it can be automated, Calibre already has a scheduler), then I have the whole WSJ, plus NYTimes, plus my local newspaper, plus other feeds, for my daily commute in San Francisco public transportation. Not worse than Kindle :-)

Big thanks go to Kovid for his software.

[drnkusv]

I am curious about what you are noticing about the built-in recipe that is not working optimally? As far as I can tell, it picks up all of the articles in the print edition, except if there is a particular category that has too many articles in it. I modified the recipe slightly to eliminate the maximum number of articles limit and instead limit it by the age of the article (ie, articles only 2 days old or less), and it seems to have solved the problem.

Are there other types of articles that you have seen not being picked up?

[ddavtian]

I saw few articles from the today's paper (Toyota to Cut Bonuses 10% ..., Conglomerate Bets on Macau, Chicago Banks on Private Parking) that were not in built in version. This may be related to the limit on number of articles.

I will try the built-in recipe again with more articles in each section. Now it's easy to modify it within Calibre, I can remove feeds that I'm not interested, to minimize the size of the file (it's 12Mb today).

Is your change for limit by article age in Calibre or you have it locally? Can you share it here?

Edit: Is this the option to control the age: "oldest_article = 2"?

[drnkusv]

Yes -- that is the option I used.

My recipe is attached, though with the warning that I have no idea what I am doing, so it may not be very good