'Ordering' a RSS news feed so it shows the stories in order of importance

piquet_D

if anyone could help me with this i'd be grateful!

i have a news widget installed on my vista sidebar.
it's very simple: it takes the BBC news front page RSS feed and lists the top 5 or so stories in the same order of importance as they appear on the web page. it means i can just glance at the sidebar and the top stories are always there and are automatically updated. it saves me having to open the actual website every time i want to glance at the headlines.

now i have a RSS reader on my phone with a widget that displays a RSS feed on the home screen of the phone. if i subscribe to the same BBC news RSS feed it doesn't list the stories in the same order of importance as they appear on the web page. it just displays them with the newest story first.

is there anyway to get the RSS reader to display the top stories first (in the same order) as the vista widget does?

thanks.

Dave_C_2

bizimcopluk wrote: »

thanks you share

This is exactly the same wording as this poster's other 9 posts.
Undoubtedly the pink stuff :spam:

timbim_2

Are you sure you're subscribing to the same feed? Looking at this one, it would appear that the only information encoded is the story and the publishing time, no information on the priority. It could well be that your desktop app has subscribed to a different feed which reflects homepage order and not time.

piquet_D

timbim wrote: »

Are you sure you're subscribing to the same feed? Looking at this one, it would appear that the only information encoded is the story and the publishing time, no information on the priority. It could well be that your desktop app has subscribed to a different feed which reflects homepage order and not time.

thanks for the reply.

as far as i can tell the desktop widget uses this RSS feed: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=uk and displays the stories in the feed in exactly the same order as they appear on the front page of the BBC news site -i.e. the most important news first.

if i then take that same RSS feed and stick it in a RSS reader, (i've tried several), they all present the info by time/date published rather than in the order the widget does.

timbim_2

That leads us to the conclusion that it's the reader and not the feed. Could just be that most readers, due to the nature of most RSS content, will order by date by default. There may be a setting somewhere you could change.

Otherwise, the only solution I can see would be to fudge it and run a script on a server to pull the feed in and add a fake sorting date to each item so that the reader displays them in the order you want. Of course it will then give you the wrong date for everything.

Tim