2024-11-08 | #rss #yahoo #newswaffle | @Acidus
The semi-public RSS feeds of Yahoo News, which power the aggregated news feature of 🧇 NewsWaffle, are essentially dead. I need to find a new option if I want to have an aggregated news feature. I discussed more about new aggregators and adopting Yahoo news in the post below:
News Aggregators and 🧇 NewsWaffle
Even when I implemented this in mid-2022, these RSS feeds were not in great shape. They weren't publicly documented by Yahoo, and I had to do a lot of digging to locate them. While some of them were healthy and being updated, others were not. The Sports topic RSS feed from Yahoo News had only a few entries that were many years old. The Entertainment feed was the same. But at the time, the Business, Headlines, Science, Technology, and World news topic feeds all were up-to-date and contained 20+ items, so for a time, it worked.
Sadly, that is no longer the case.
Besides the "Headlines" feed, the rest of the topic feeds have been crippled to only show the 5 most recent items. Often these items are already in the main Headlines feed. The entire point of adopting a news aggregator was so users could read articles from multiple sites about a specific topic. With only 5 items in a topic feed (and the Sports and Entertainment topics still show ancient stories), there is now no value left in Yahoo's RSS feeds. For now, I've updated NewsWaffle to default to the "Headlines" feed, since that is the only active feed with more than 5 items. Longer term I am reconsidering how to implement a news aggregator feature.
So why not just adopt Google News? That's a story for another post.
FWIW, here are the RSS feeds I had been using, on the off chance they get resurrected: