Modified Articles, updated_entries.json

[jbrayton]

Hi. I have an entry that I would expect to see in updated_entries.json, but I do not.

This is the relevant subscription from subscriptions.json:

{
    "id": 5446758,
    "created_at": "2020-04-10T23:08:05.129193Z",
    "feed_id": 1758040,
    "title": "framed blog",
    "feed_url": "http://jbframed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default",
    "site_url": "http://jbframed.blogspot.com/"
  }

This is the entry that has a modification:

GET https://api.feedbin.com/v2/entries.json?ids=2410826543&mode=extended

[
  {
    "id": 2410826543,
    "feed_id": 1758040,
    "title": "Post - changed",
    "author": "John Brayton",
    "summary": "Post v2",
    "content": "Post v2",
    "url": "https://jbframed.blogspot.com/2020/04/post-not-changed-yet.html",
    "published": "2020-04-10T23:06:00.000000Z",
    "created_at": "2020-04-10T23:56:43.849710Z",
    "original": {
      "author": "John Brayton",
      "content": "here is my post. It does not have any changes yet.",
      "title": "Post - not changed yet",
      "url": "http://jbframed.blogspot.com/2020/04/post-not-changed-yet.html",
      "entry_id": "tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5317123248993435941.post-9065946295209184506",
      "published": "2020-04-10T23:06:00.000Z",
      "data": {
        "itunes_image": null
      }
    },
    "twitter_id": null,
    "twitter_thread_ids": [],
    "extracted_content_url": "https://extract.feedbin.com/parser/feedbin/26910dc4950f48fb380ef06d4e8199d5885462ef?base64_url=aHR0cHM6Ly9qYmZyYW1lZC5ibG9nc3BvdC5jb20vMjAyMC8wNC9wb3N0LW5vdC1jaGFuZ2VkLXlldC5odG1s",
    "images": null,
    "enclosure": null,
    "extracted_articles": [],
    "json_feed": null
  }
]

The JSON reflects that the title and content of the article changed.

But I do not see this ID in my list of updated_entries.json:

GET https://api.feedbin.com/v2/updated_entries

[
  2411117965,
  2410751089,
  2410707241,
  2410606924,
  2409597901,
  2408420500,
  2409874238,
  2408332219,
  2409316024,
  2408973841,
  2406015352,
  2408300251,
  2405967210,
  2408317238,
  2407860510,
  2407489736,
  2407241196,
  2407416511,
  2406272148,
  2405876664,
  2403029363,
  2405302662,
  2403082460,
  2404032058,
  2405307823,
  2404611147,
  2401999412,
  2402973340,
  2402825283,
  2403864536,
  2403757566,
  2401082049,
  2400901201,
  2396800697,
  2402726095,
  2402957970,
  2402916655,
  2402065975,
  2402727600,
  2401988649,
  2401722028,
  2398404416,
  2400732330,
  2401849398,
  2399157134,
  2401664249,
  2399340552,
  2401082297,
  2401114067,
  2400268440,
  2400609561,
  2399326701,
  2400388414,
  2400438725,
  2400491796,
  2399347014,
  2399983964,
  2399405685,
  2399372578,
  2399398156,
  2399188757,
  2399152248,
  2398956368,
  2399103545,
  2398495075,
  2396475617,
  2397972564,
  2397332613,
  2395721988,
  2395721998,
  2396850015,
  2394504452,
  2396301315,
  2395721990,
  2397325332,
  2397279590,
  2393045808,
  2388605718,
  2394402716,
  2394573254,
  2389516799,
  2386328675,
  2375784904,
  2375825397,
  2374504144,
  2373264560,
  2373264561,
  2372638440,
  2361708738,
  2359578246,
  2359645930,
  2357013887,
  2352475813,
  2352357259,
  2350250806,
  2327446833,
  2323690532,
  2319644871,
  2321463992,
  2322042487
]

These API calls are from my jbrayton@virtualsanity.com account. Is something working incorrectly, or am I wrong to expect the article with ID 2410826543 to appear in updated_entries.json?

I thought the problem might be that the article was marked read, but I repeated the experiment with another article (Entry ID 2411354490) and was careful not to read it or mark it read. The content of that article changed, but that article also did not appear in updated_entries.json.

[benubois]

Hi @jbrayton,

The documentation isn't clear about this, but records only get added to updated_entries if there are significant changes to an article. This is because Feedbin does not want to surface articles where there are only minor changes.

This significance threshold is currently set a 50 characters for an article published within the last seven days.

Does that work for your use case or are you looking to make sure all articles are at the latest version?

[jbrayton]

Oh, ok. I wonder if there is benefit to picking up smaller changes – things like fixes to typos.

But my immediate need is just to test retrieval of updates. I just need to change more text in articles. I can do that. 😀

Thanks, @benubois!

[jbrayton]

Coming back to this, it is now clear to me that the purpose of updated_entries is for the client both to retrieve updates and to tell the user that an article has changed. And one would not want an app to point out that an article has a very minor update.

I did not intend to point out articles that have updates – although I should consider doing that. I do ideally want to have the most recent versions of changed articles. I can work with this as-is, but I would be eager to use an API call that told me what articles had any HTML changes in order to keep the local database of articles up-to-date.

Thanks again for your clarification on this.