Take the giant Google badge out of the reader

2026-11-13T19:56:19+00:00

"Remove giant Google icon", reported on a West Hawaii Today article. It is the "Add as a preferred source on Google" badge that sits beside the byline. Giant because the page caps it at 120px with its own stylesheet and the reader drops the page's CSS, so a small badge on the site becomes a full-width image above the first paragraph. Matched on the link's address rather than the class, and that is forced rather than preferred: running the vendored Readability.js over the real page shows the wrapper's preferred_source_badge class does not survive extraction at all, so a class rule would match nothing. The anchor does survive, and its address is Google's own and identical for every publisher in the programme -- where the badge's image filename sits under this newspaper's theme directory and is not. So the address is both the only signal left and the one that generalises. A link with words in it is never touched. An article may discuss the programme and link to it in a sentence, and that sentence is the author's. Both cleaners now run from one entry point. There are two places a body is cleaned -- a fresh extraction on the way out, a cached one on the way back in -- and a cached article is cleaned in place rather than discarded, so a cleaner wired into only the fresh path would leave every already-read article carrying litter nothing would ever remove. Peter's report says the article was cached, which is exactly that case. Pinned against the real thing: the reported article, put through the real extractor, loses the badge and keeps its text and byline. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AwnALZL6bD4VBtATDVv3B

Fix stray promo headers, site-URL subscribing, and YouTube playback

2026-10-21T19:07:17+00:00

Three reported bugs. **"West Hawaii today articles get a bunch of stray Trending headers."** The publisher's widget platform injects promo blocks between the real paragraphs, inside the article's own container, so every structural signal tells Readability they belong. What survives is a heading labelling nothing, because the links under it are filled in by a script that never runs in the reader. Confirmed on 9 of the 12 articles in that feed, two each. Blocks marked `data-mrf-recirculation` are now removed -- the attribute says what the block is for in the widget platform's own words, which is a better signal than the word "Trending", since an article may legitimately discuss what is trending. Nothing longer than a label and a few headlines is ever removed. Also applied to already-cached articles, in place rather than by discarding them: the article was fine, only the litter has to go. **"Can't subscribe to heathercoxrichardson.substack.com."** Adding a feed handed whatever URL it was given straight to the XML parser, so a site's home page -- the only URL a reader can actually see and copy -- failed on the root element. That page advertises its feed the way sites have since 2002, in a in the head. It is now read, resolved against the page, and fetched. Only what the page declares: guessing /feed and /rss would add a burst of 404s to every failed add and eventually subscribe somebody to the wrong thing. **"YouTube play is misconfigured."** It was, and YouTube said so: the player dialog loaded the embed as its own top-level document, which answers with "Video player configuration error -- Error 153". An embed has to be embedded. It now sits in an iframe on a minimal host page. Measured in the app's own WebView: top-level, no requests for the video stream and the error on screen; framed, the stream loads and there is no error. **"Long click on YouTube placeholder should open the URL directly."** It does now. Worth recording why this is not simply the link's href: for an image inside a link, WebView's hit test reports the image's URL, so a long-press on the thumbnail arrives as the i.ytimg.com JPEG. The video id is resolved out of that. Verified on a device for all four: the Substack site URL adds "Letters from an American" and fetches 20 articles; a West Hawaii Today article extracts with no Trending headers and its body intact; the video plays; and a long-press reaches the YouTube app. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AwnALZL6bD4VBtATDVv3B

feedreader.git/app/src/test/resources, branch master

Take the giant Google badge out of the reader

Fix stray promo headers, site-URL subscribing, and YouTube playback