Dams and Pinkies

Dived into Ender's Game, a book I've been meaning to read for ages.

Not much else done during the day besides reading and getting thoroughly annoyed at Weblogs, Inc. sites for constantly changing their postings (and re-posting stuff across their many sites). The end result is that floods my inbox with duplicate messages, because:

  1. The initial post was updated for some reason.
  2. The post doesn't seem to be updated, but either some markup was fixed or some other (invisible) change was made (which changes the md5 hash of the item and makes think it was updated).
  3. They changed their ads yet again (which makes think all the items were updated and triggers a complete feed refresh). This last one seems to be a bug, since Bruno complains of the same and believes that checks the md5 before stripping ads (which seems likely to me, although I haven't checked that yet).
  4. The same content was re-posted (with very minor changes) to another of their sub-sites.
  5. All the above.
  6. All the above, in spades.

I've started trimming the number of feeds I subscribe to again and disabling update detection in , but that won't eliminate all of the nuisances.

Meanwhile, thanks to Delfim, I hit upon a very quick way of clearing my news inbox from stuff I've already read and have no interest on. A quick twist of my PowerMate lets me gloss over my messages, a long click flags them, and I trigger this  via Mail Act-On every now and then:

tell application "Mail"
        set theMessages to (every message in mailbox "INBOX" of account "News"
            whose read status = true and flagged status = false)
        repeat with eachMessage in theMessages
                try
                        tell application "Mail"
                                delete eachMessage
                        end tell
                end try
        end repeat
end tell

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