Is the New York Times saved items section a supported site?

Instruction #2 on the Troubleshooting Issues with Zotero Translators page (https://www.zotero.org/support/troubleshooting_translator_issues) says:

2. If you only see a webpage icon, make sure you're looking at a supported site. If you're not sure, try a New York Times article or an Amazon product page.

Well ironically, I'm having trouble with the New York Times. For subscribers the Times has a feature allowing articles to be saved for later. It works for both desktop (by signing in on the Time's web site) by using the paper's mobile apps.

I'm trying to go through my saved items and add some of them to Zotero. But when I access an item (e.g. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/social-media-dumber-steven-pinker.html), the translator is showing a web page instead of a newspaper icon. Even worse, the imported metadata don't have author, publication, place, and date, and not surprisingly a pdf of the article itself does not load.

What's the best way to fix this?
  • edited March 7, 2018
    Interesting. I accessed the other page by using Chrome on an iMac. The Times allows users to save items from their desktop, as well as from mobile devices. So I didn't understand why the link I got was "mobile."

    With the Times' interface on both its web site and the mobile app, originally I couldn't find how to access previously saved items. So I Googled "how to remove saved items in New York Times app." The first link returned was like the one you found, but I clicked the second returned item, which says "Saved - NYTimes.com - The New York Times." But closer inspection reveals an actual URI of "https://mobile.nytimes.com/saved."

    The first returned item is "My Saved Items - The New York Times" and its associated URI is https://www.nytimes.com/saved." And, unlike the other one, this does yield a newspaper icon and good metadata.

    So thank you for your help. It was enough information that, with a little detective work on my part, was enough to figure out what the problem was.

    But there's still one more problem. Neither the mobile or the immobile page downloads a pdf copy of the article.

    I still have to use Clearly to isolate the article, "print" it as a pdf but actually save it as a pdf, run it through Adobe to reduce the size (typically about 80% size reduction), attach it to the Zotero entry, and use Zotfile's Manage Attachments > Rename Attachments command to change the pdf's file name and store it on my NAS.

    Any suggestions for automating this last part of the workflow would be most appreciated.
  • You're misunderstanding what Zotero does. It only downloads PDFs where they're provided by the publisher, which isn't the case for the NYT. Otherwise you just get a website snapshot.
  • The mobile version should work now also after the translator was updated.
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