Strider Icon    Some headlines keep re-appearing after a while
 

Strider is expecting the XML files that are provided by the web sites referenced by the bookmarks. Two parts are essential for Strider to determine whether an item has been already fetched or not: the headline title and the headline publication date. Unfortunately, many sites still don't provide any publication date. When that occurs, Strider defaults to attribute the current date and time as the publication date of the newly fetched headline. As the time goes by, at some point, depending on your setting for headline persistence, the read headlines will disappear from the list. Since they are still on the web site that provide the RSS feed through that XML file, and since they still don't have a publication date, Strider fetches them again the next time the bookmark is refreshed. To avoid having the same headline appearing again, Strider maintains a history of all read headlines. When it's about to add a new headline that it doesn't know about, Strider will check to see if the same headline is in the history by looking at the title. If a headline with the same title is found in the history, then Strider will assume that this particular headline from that particular web site has already been fetched and displayed and won't add it to the list for that bookmark.

However, there is a limit to the number of headlines that can be kept in the history. The current version of Strider allows you to set the number of days during which the headlines will be kept in the history. There is a global setting and you can also enter a specific value for a specific bookmark. The goal of keeping a large enough history (default of 30 days) is to make sure that when a headline with a publication date older than the duration of the history is about to be removed, it will have also been removed from the web site that provided it initially. If, however, older headlines are still present in the XML file from the web site, they will reappear as new headlines for the bookmark of the web site. This depends of the specific web site and the way that the webmaster manage the XML file containing the headlines. If that happens for some bookmarks, you can increase the duration of the history globally or, better, you can increase it only for the bookmarks of web sites that seem to keep their headlines for a longer period of time. The longer the duration of the global history, the larger the Strider preferences file will be, since Strider saves the headlines of the history in its preferences file. Remember that the global history value is used for all bookmarks that don't have a specific value and there is a risk to see the size of Strider preferences file growing dramatically, specially if you are accessing web sites that produce a large number of headlines. You can experiment by increasing the value in days of the history and by monitoring the size of the preferences file and checking how long Strider takes to load and save the preferences file. Since Strider needs to check the history every time a bookmark is refreshed, all headlines in the history are kept in memory, which can also grows if a large history is kept.

To override the global history value for a specific bookmark, select the bookmark in the list. Then, choose Show Bookmark Info from the News menu or click the button in the toolbar. In the window that appears, make sure that the Use Global Persistence Preferences checkbox is off. Then, you can set the history value for that bookmark. Remember to press Enter when you modify that value in the textfield so that Strider can register it.