So I'm running this webportal, aggregating blogs from various sources. For most parts things are running smoothly but there are two issues that occur repeatedly and I rather need them to be fixed.
- Sporadic encoding problems.
- Blogger feed aggregation problems.
All the blogs are in Icelandic and thus most of them encoded with iso-8859-1. As Drupal is using UTF-8 encoding there seems to be a clash every now and then (very irregularily), leading to the fact that all non-english characters in a given blog entry (á, æ, ö, ð, þ to name a few) are displayed in a weird character combination (á, æ, Ö, ð, þ to name a few).
This does not apply to all feeds at the same time, and not always the same feeds, but some are more at risk than others.
Most of the time this can be fixed by manually updating the feed, but that is not always the case.
It has been suggested to me that the iso-8859-1 encoded feeds are being stored in Drupal as utf-8 without being transcoded first, but I don't have a faintest idea how to solve this or where to solve it, for that matter.
Searching the drupal website suggests that there's a function named drupal_convert_to_utf8() and to me it looks like a possible fix, but what I'm lacking is the skill to apply it to the problem.
Any suggestions?
As with the other problem, I've run across that one around here somewhere, but here's the gist of it:
Some Blogger feeds (all of whom are hosted at blogspot.com) are acting up. Sometimes, by reimporting all feed items when a new entry is found (and then all of them with the exact same timestamp and all non-english characters fux0red in the way mentioned above) but always by displaying a wrong url of the feed item (assigning the URL of the earliest entry to be found in the feed at any given time, to all entries in the feed).
This is becoming rather annoying, and resulting in far more administration time for the website than acceptable.
Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated and hopefully someone out there has an answer that assists me in solving these annoying problems.
Oh, and the system: Drupal 4.7.3, MySQL 4.1.*, running on Debian (if that matters)
The URL: http://tidarandinn.is (you never know, it might be acting up when you hit the link, as I never know when it happens - but don't expect to understand anything, as it's in Icelandic :)).
Comments
Well, I came across the same
Well, I came across the same issue as well. It is probably got something to do with publishing time. Maybe when users republish all their content, the time stamps change and aggregation on Drupal gets messed up.
Confirmation of problem
I needed to get a feed in from a blogspot URI; to start with, it only displayed the oldest item for the feed.
I have now set up a test installation of Drupal 5.1 on my laptop and have managed to replicate the problem with three random blogspot feeds - all of them in English.
All feeds show as zero items. I've validated the feeds, no errors.
Keep hitting "update items" and eventually got one to work, then another and finally the third.
Unfortunately, I can't get this to work on my live system.
If it's a timestamp issue, I don't really understand it. Both my laptop and production server are time synchronised at Stratum 4 or better, so the clocks will only be milliseconds out.
Update: Just had a look at the database; feed items on the feeds not working are NOT getting inserted into the feed_item table.
I've had this problem for it
I've had this problem for it seems like years. I just did the same as you, a brand new 5.1 install, and blogspot feeds won't work. I use FeedBurner.com to filter and clean the feed. no special options at feedburner are needed.
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another workaround for blogspot feeds
I came here for a solution to problem 2... every item in feeds from blogspot were being assigned the URL of the oldest story in the feed.
Another workaround discussed here is to make use of the alternate RSS2 feed by including feeds/posts/default?alt=rss as part of the feed's URL. Works like a charm. :)