I have been trying to add some feeds to my News Aggregator and have been running into problems that perhaps someone more experienced than I am could help me solve.
First, a number of feeds that deliver content without problem in my Google Reader come back as "broken" when I add them to the aggregator. This is puzzling to me, but I noticed that a number of them (not all) are Blogger/Blogspot sites. Is there some kind of problem with Blogger feeds that anyone here knows of? Anecdotally, I would say that my friends and I have encountered a number of Blogger hosted sites with problematic or non-existent feeds. A Google search turned up no information, however.
For the feeds that come through properly in my RSS feeder but won't pull content for my News Aggregator page... is it possible that they are treating my Aggregator's request as a hostile (or, at the least, unwelcome) one? I can think of no other reason why the same feed address would work in an RSS reader but not for my site. Any help understanding how I might troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.
Secondly, is there any way on the Drupal-end for me to set the feed to only display TITLE and EXCERPT (not sure if those are the right terms), regardless of whether or not the site sends out the full content in their feed? I am getting a mix of results -- some feeds displaying just title and an excerpt, others displaying the entire post.
I don't want anyone accusing me of stealing their content, so I'm desperte to find a way to make my Aggregator pages display no more than the headline and a standard snippet of text. I have not been able to find any information on how I might do this on my end, in Drupal. Has anyone here tried to do the same thing?
Thirdly, some of the feeds are displaying HTML tags in their headlines, despite the fact that I added those basic tags to the list in the "Allowed HTML tags:" box on my Aggregator Settings page. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works. Any suggestions?
Comments
RSS or Atom?
Are you using RSS or Atom feeds from Blogspot? It's been a while since I had to deal with this, but ISTR that Aggregator doesn't support Atom, so you have to hunt around Blogspot for the RSS 2.0 feed. Google for some reason defaults its blogs to Atom.
The following sentence is true.
The preceding sentence is false.
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I believe most of them are Atom....
Thanks for responding drumdance.
I didn't realize that Blogger only creates Atom feeds and that the Aggregator might have problems with that. While clearing up something I didn't understand, I'm still not sure that this new knowledge solves the problem.
First, I found this --
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20060606134443
Which says that, although there was no official announcement, Blogger now publishes RSS feeds in addition to Atom feeds.
I went back and started to replace the atom feeds with RSS feed addresses. But noticed that the feeds were still pulling "0 items." I also noticed that some atom feeds were pulling items with no problem.... so... Something else must be up.
I also found this post here at Drupal --
http://drupal.org/node/65658
It focuses on the problem of the "aggregator module not reading/importing a lot of RSS feeds." But, unfortunately, the solutions make no sense to me and the suggestive remedies seem inconclusive, anyway.
Does this ring a bell for you?
Here's a thread about the Atom issue (regarding Blogger sites)
All of these issues seem to be referring to Drupal version 4.6.... I can't tell if it was addressed for the 5.x release, which we're running.
There is also this very old project thread that stops in 2005 --
http://drupal.org/node/12485
Now the feeds on the Aggregator page won't update...
...automatically more than once -- after I've manually updated each of them, they'll be set to update again in an hour (the interval I selected).
They'll update once, but then get stuck at 0 minutes till next update....
I had set poormanscron to push an overall update every hour, then changed it to every half hour to no avail.
I guess I have no idea what I'm doing. Maybe nothing's wrong and the feeds will only re-set when the cron job happens....
If I want the feeds to update approximately every hour, what's the best combination of settings for both the individual feeds and for the poormanscron update?
Aggregator Page Now Updating, But....
I am not sure, but it appears that one of my settings may have been incorrect. I force-published each feed and now the page appears to be updating on its own with the valued help of the poormanscron pulling that trigger.
Still, some of the feeds are displaying strangely on the aggregator home page.
One feed does not update on the aggregator home page, unless you click the "More" link beneath its list of headlines. Once you do that, it takes you to that particular feed's page. When you go back to the aggregator page afterwards, it's updated the headlines that it wouldn't update automatically. I'm having a devil of a time trying to figure out whether there is a problem with the feed itself or the aggregator's retrieval and display of it. How does one go about detecting the actual source of a given problem like this?
Another feed (that damned, infernal blogspot!) is giving me updated headlines on the main aggregator page but the URLS that the headlines link to are all wrong.... all linking to the same old post; the logic behind the choice being inscrutable to me. This same phenomenon has happened to several feeds on my aggregator page.
I'm going to try to keep sending out these sad, little messages in a bottle on the off chance that they might someday help a similarly clueless beginner who's also struggling with this.
The problem? I'm not coming up with any answers, unfortunately.