From 9210bf463a8818595f7ca42486a787d4f1941d55 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Stone Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:07:17 +0000 Subject: Fix stray promo headers, site-URL subscribing, and YouTube playback 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 --- .../resources/west-hawaii-today-extracted.html | 24 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 24 insertions(+) create mode 100644 app/src/test/resources/west-hawaii-today-extracted.html (limited to 'app/src/test/resources') diff --git a/app/src/test/resources/west-hawaii-today-extracted.html b/app/src/test/resources/west-hawaii-today-extracted.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c52608 --- /dev/null +++ b/app/src/test/resources/west-hawaii-today-extracted.html @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +
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Published 12:05 am Wednesday, October 21, 2026

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+ By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan NYTimes News Service +

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WASHINGTON — In late August, during one of Karoline Leavitt’s final meetings with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, he pitched her on an idea in front of several senior aides. He told her to move reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which would effectively remove news organizations from the White House. It would be, he told her, her “last legacy.”

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But the proposal never moved forward while she was there. The president had put the request to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. Leavitt officially stepped down as White House press secretary on Aug. 27.

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Trump has told aides he would prefer to bring back the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt added in 1933 as therapy for his polio-afflicted legs; President Richard Nixon later covered it over to make room for the news media.

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Trending

While moving the media out of the White House may be a relatively small debate considering Trump’s attacks on journalists more broadly, it would be highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.

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Trump has brought up the press-eviction idea before, dating to his first term, and he has never quite dropped it.

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As recently as Sept. 27, Trump shared a pair of images on Truth Social showing the briefing room as it is now, captioned “Fake News,” alongside another that shows the space reimagined as a gilded swimming pool, captioned “FDR Pool.”

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The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Trump had repeatedly discussed moving the press corps out of the White House, and that his advisers had so far either offered pushback or waited for him to move on.

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What has changed since Trump’s first term or even earlier this term is the staff around him. The president’s core team has shrunk from the already-tight unit that he brought into the White House last year. During earlier discussions, most of Trump’s senior aides agreed it served him better to keep the media nearby. But Trump has grown more enraged about his press coverage, and other advisers of growing influence have encouraged him to take drastic measures to punish journalists.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Trending

© 2026 The New York Times Company

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