Text view is missing paragraphs from a feed

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  • Updated 2 months ago
I subscribe to the Washington Post's "Plumline" blog, which NewsBlur has always had problems with. The only noticeable effect to me was that NewsBlur couldn't save my preference to view this feed in text mode, so I had to specify that each time. A tad annoying, but no big deal. Today, I noticed that the text view is dropping paragraphs from the article, which means I have to click through to the original website or things make no sense.

It seems likely that the blog changed something about their formatting, since I can still read older stories without dropped paragraphs. However, I don't see a problem with other Washington Post blogs, so I'm not sure.

TIA
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Chaim Schramm

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Posted 2 months ago

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Samuel Clay, Official Rep

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Can you share the newsblur.com/site url of the feed when you are reading it in NewsBlur?
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Chaim Schramm

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Is this what you are looking for?
https://www.newsblur.com/site/333187/plum-line
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Samuel Clay, Official Rep

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Yep, that's it. So it looks like it's working as well as it could. I'm using a library called Readability and this is their bread and butter. If they can't extract the text, there's not much else I can do. It comes down to the heuristics.
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Chaim Schramm

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OK. It looks like Readability can handle the actual page fine, so that would mean it's something about parsing the actual feed, right? Would you recommend I contact Readability or WaPo?

Thanks for the help!
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Samuel Clay, Official Rep

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I'd contact wapo and ask if they can add a class to the surrounding article so that readability can grab the article.