cogdogblog: Feed2RSS: Minor Cleanups and Fixing My Goofs Comments and Trackbacks

CDB Entry: Feed2RSS: Minor Cleanups and Fixing My Goofs

Wed, 26 May 2004 13:22:19 -0700

It's been nice getting wide and praising notes, comments, trackbask about the new Feed2RSS-- I must admit being eager to rush it out and while the MagpieRSS seems to be running smoothly, I had a few minor goofs that others...

comment by: Alan Levine

Wed, 26 May 2004 14:14:44 -0700

More doh! D'Arcy just ichatted me in the middle of a dull meeting (bless wireless)- with a parse error on line 100- it was a missing semi-colon on the end of line 97. Just uploaded a replacement.

-- King of typos

comment by: Dan Schellenberg

Wed, 26 May 2004 16:02:30 -0700

I have the script working properly at:
http://educationaltechnology.ca/test.html

Check the source out there, though it is essentially the same as described above by Allan.

It seems to be working fine, and is validating properly as well (click on the valid XHTML link at the bottom of the page).

comment by: Alan Levine

Wed, 26 May 2004 16:09:11 -0700

Thanks much Dan. The problem was I was testing the embedded JavaScript URLs directly to the browser (where & is replaced by & in the CGI params). When in the source HTML, the & are rendered BACK to & for the links, and thus it works well.

I will look into changing the build script to do this substitution, but if XHTML compliance is key, you can do some editing on your JavaScript embeds.

comment by: todd

Fri, 28 May 2004 09:08:59 -0700

It seems to be working for me at http://idea.matc.tec.oh.us/feeds --thanks for your work! I need to look into the cache settings because I've had it up for about a day and I don't see any files in my cache directory.

Also, my blog doesn't publish date with dc but uses pubDate; got any hints for fixing that :) ?

comment by: Alan Levine

Fri, 28 May 2004 09:45:43 -0700

Todd, Magpie creates cryptic named cache files, e.g.

896308a033830edc06253e2838ad8644
37f206fd8a53505bc87d38dd63fb9f38
06c6631ffb0ab9639e4a631049b5ad8a

but I am not sure how/when it decideds to create a new one. It looks like they each correspond to a different RSS URL.

I am not sure how you are trying to view the files, it may be they are hidden becaise of their naming style? I'd have to investigate to see why it would not be writing files. If you are not getting PHP errors than it must be dealing with write permissions okay.

As far as the way the date values are accessed, this is the beauty of Magpie- no matter what XML tag is used to define the date (pudDate, dc:date. etc) Magpie finds it and returns it to an array always named dc:date-- it does not mean that your pubDate values are ignored, they are just referenced by a different name later. This way, my script does not have to do all kinds of branching depending on the RSS feed type.

I have tested this on RSS 2.0 feeds that use pubdate and it works as advertised.

comment by: David Carter-Tod

Sat, 29 May 2004 12:20:58 -0700

I haven't installed these latest versions yet, but on the first version, I couldn't get the cache to work until I created a directory called "cache" (not "cached") with the right permissions (775 should do it by the way, not 777).

Also, although the code seems to support it, I'm not seeing etags coming through. This is a critical bandwidth saver.

David

comment by: David Carter-Tod

Sat, 29 May 2004 12:22:03 -0700

Oh, and those long, convoluted strings for file names look like MD5 encodings of the url requested. It's a guaranteed way to get a unique id.

David

comment by: Alan Levine

Sat, 29 May 2004 19:10:51 -0700

David,

I've not run into an issue with Magpie needing a specific name for the cache directory/ It looks like it tries to create on named "cache" if is not defined, but my tests show ti writing to ones name "cached"-- though it would not hut to suggest the default name.

As far as permissions (which I am hardly a master of mostly a slave), it may vary depend on how servers are set up and wether the process that runs the server is consider a "group" owner. The code comments read:

" * MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR - Where should Magpie cache parsed RSS objects?
* This should be a location that the webserver can write to. If this
* directory does not already exist Mapie will try to be smart and create
* it. This will often fail for permissions reasons."

I usuallly go 777 for places my webserver needs to write to. But I cannot say I tested with 775.

And I would need to know more of what an "etag" is to comment. I would prefer not to try and do wild parsing on different versions of RSS feeds...

comment by: Gerry Paille

Mon, 31 May 2004 10:56:26 -0700

I am not getting anything written to the "cached" directory either. I have tried using David's suggestion by renaming the directory to cache and double checking the permissions. I also deleted the "cached" directory all together to see if Magpie would create a new directrory and it did not.

comment by: Gerry Paille

Mon, 31 May 2004 13:44:53 -0700

I have the cache working, but I'm not 100% sure what I did that caused the change. I think it is pretty much as Dave described above. I changed the name of the directory from cached to cache and edited the feed2js.php file to reflect the name change. The permissons for the cache directory look like this:

drwxrwxrwx 4 admin admin 136 31 May 13:39 cache

comment by: Alan Levine

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 09:25:49 -0700

I will have to dig deeper in the cache directory issue-- But I have it running fine writing a directory named "cached":

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/cached/c4e70593705e2b86cb9daf9f767e0485

but it looks like fomr Gerry and David's case a better suggestion is one named "cache".

A first thing to try would be to turn on the Magpie debugging, set to "2":

// value of 2 optionally show lots of debugging info, 0 for production
define('MAGPIE_DEBUG', 2);

Another issue is that I thought one could use a relative path- you might try an absolute path for MAGPIE_DIR. If the relative fails, Magpie creates the one called "cache" which might explain your situations.

// Path to cache directory (must be writable permissions CHMOD 777)
// The simplest is a directory inside the location of this file
// define('MAGPIE_DIR', './cached/')

Also try using the magpie_debug.php script provided to test your settings as well.

Trackback from "Feed2RSS Available"

Fri, 28 May 2004 10:10:09 -0700

Excerpt: I just finished getting what I think is a working setup of Feed2RSS, provided by Alan Levine. Just paste in the URL of a feed and it generates the javascript code you need to add the headlines to your Web page. A couple of issues I have noticed: from m...
��Weblog: Big IDEA
��Tracked: May 28, 2004 10:10 AM

Trackback from "Feed2JS"

Wed, 26 May 2004 17:40:08 -0700

Excerpt: I recently stumbled upon the Feed to JavaScript tool created by Alan Levine from the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction(mcli). An incredibly useful tool that allows you to aggregate xml feeds (rss, atom, etc.) and call them via a simple Java...
��Weblog: Dan Schellenberg
��Tracked: May 26, 2004 05:40 PM