Help - Experimental - Download all

There is a hidden feature in LuckNews.

I wanted to provide the ability to download all the articles for a subscription, even those articles which are no longer showing up in the associated RSS feed.  A short review: a subscription may contain many hundreds of articles but the RSS feed typically only contains the latest 20 or so.  If you find a subscription you enjoy, you may want to have LuckNews fetch all of the articles, even the old ones.

Doing this is poorly supported among the different RSS feeds.  There are many different web servers which provide the RSS service for the different subscriptions, and they each have different feature sets.  They all support the simple fetching of the most recent content for the RSS feed, and this is how LuckNews is able to get the data is presents to you.  However, not all web servers offer any additional functionality to do things such as access older data.

As I can not offer this feature in a well supported manner, I felt reluctant to make it available in LuckNews - I only want features that I can support and that are useful to a majority of my customers to be available in the application.  However, I was able to get Google to sometimes, not always, download all the articles for the subscriptions it hosts.

So, if you have a subscription which is hosted by Google, and you want to download all of the articles for that subscription, LuckNews may be able to help.  However, if this doesn't work for you - sorry, but I won't be able to help you.

To access this functionality, if you are running LuckNews, quit it.  Now hold down the option key and launch LuckNews again.  After LuckNews has started you will see a menu called 'Experimental' appear.  In that menu there is an item called 'Download all Articles…'.  Select the subscription you want to get all articles for and then select this menu item.

Once you have the articles in LuckNews, to ensure that they don't go away again you will need to alter the subscription's expiry type from the default value.  I change this value to always keep the articles as this is why I'm downloading them - I want to be able to read them again, or search through them for content later.


I have found that Google will sometimes provide all the data for a subscription, and sometimes not.  If it doesn't work today, try again later or tomorrow.  If it doesn't work a few times in a row, it may not ever work.  Some subscriptions work, others don't.

As I said, this is an Experimental function.  I hope some others find it useful - I don't expect it to be useful to very many people.  If there other sailors out there - this is for you as there are many sailing blogs hosted on Google and having those old articles available to you when you are miles away from networks may be useful (I combine this feature with cacheing images and sometimes also downloading the HTML and can search through old articles while at anchor in remote areas.)

No further support is offered for this feature.

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