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FeedGrab ExpressionEngine plugin

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Andrew Weaver

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FeedGrab is a plugin for pMachine’s Expression Engine to provide it with the ability to import data from 3rd party web feeds (RSS or ATOM), such as flickr or delicious. 

A possible use is for a Tumblelog (such as this one on jeffcroft.com) or Adactio’s Elsewhere, to create a place to tie together various strands of data scattered across the internet.

Download: FeedGrab plugin latest version

See the brandnewbox tumblelog for a working demo.

A forum thread exists on pmachine.com for bug reports, feature requests etc.

UPDATE: I’ve added a FeedGrab tutorial.

Comments

1.
5th Oct 2006 at 7:06 am

Hello!

At my site this plugin do not add anything.
I setup a grabing template and a news weblog to grab into. While manually grabing feeds using template I recieve:

Fetching: http://ma.gnolia.com/rss/full/tags/nature
Checking: Articles and Information about Nature, Nutrition, Health and Medicine
Checking: A Truly Stunning Land Gift
Checking: Pattern Language.com
Checking: WhatBird | identify birds | bird identification guide | north america
Checking: Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot: John Maxwell: Jamaica at Another Crossroad
Checking: Backyard Birder | A reader blog about birding with Dorothy A. Borders
Checking: Animal Planet :: Backyard Habitat
Checking: WhatBird | identify birds | bird identification guide | north america
Checking: South Dakota Birds and Birding - Home Page
Checking: A Nature Haven - Original Australian Photography : CafePress.com
...

But no news are added to the blog :(( What i do wrong?

2.
5th Oct 2006 at 7:13 am

Hi Yukki

I’m currently fixing a problem with the method the plugin uses to check for duplicate entries. I should get a new version up this week.

There’s a forum thread here with more details.

3.
5th Oct 2006 at 7:21 am

Me again :)

Sometimes for new feed i receive

Fetching: http://ma.gnolia.com/rss/lite/tags/underwater
Checking: fuji underwater housing
Date: 2006-10-02T12:01:57 +0300 (Mon, 2 October 2006 02:01:57 PDT)
Found: fuji underwater housing

But again no entries added to weblog section.

4.
5th Oct 2006 at 7:31 am

That suggests it *should* be getting added. Is there any sign of it when you look in the EE interface?

Let me get a new version of the code working (today or tomorrow). This will remove a couple of known issues and should make debugging a bit easier.

Thanks for your feedback

5.
6th Oct 2006 at 8:22 am

OK - I’ve fixed a couple of bugs and uploaded a new 0.5.4 version (see link above).

6. Robert
6th Oct 2006 at 5:41 pm

Hi Andrew, first, thanks for taking the time to make this. it is appreciated. Second, I too am having a problem. I get the same feed as Yukki above did but my blog does not get updated. I’ve tried to set up a new blog to test it and that too fails to update. Any idea where I am going wrong?

7.
9th Oct 2006 at 7:20 am

Thanks to all of you who have sent in reports that it does not seem to be adding the entries to your weblogs.

To help me fix this I’d be very grateful if can you send me some more details so I can try and replicate the problem.

It would be useful to know:

any error messages you are getting
what version of EE you are using
the contents of template you are using to call FeedGrab
details of the weblog (eg, field names) you are trying to insert the entry into

You’re welcome to email these if you don’t want your details shown.

Many thanks again to everyone testing this.

8. Robert
9th Oct 2006 at 7:43 am

Hi Andrew, the problem rests between my ears. I used the weblog name rather than the id number. Changed that as well as tweeking the field names and everything works fine. Thanks once again.

9.
9th Oct 2006 at 9:17 am

No problem, Robert, thanks for letting me know.

The error checking is v. weak at the moment - the plugin should catch that kind of error, really.

10. Robert
20th Oct 2006 at 1:22 pm

Hi Andrew, one quick question: The feeds I grab include table formatting. Any suggestions on how to strip that info out?

Many thanks, Robert

11.
23rd Oct 2006 at 5:11 am

The FeedGrab plugin won’t do anything clever to parse out the table information, but you might be able to do something clever when displaying the field.

The PHPStringFun plugin is quite good if you know PHP a little.

12.
24th Dec 2006 at 6:08 pm

Hi!
Nice info, big thx.

13. Emily
4th Feb 2007 at 5:46 am

Andrew,
Thanks for your work on this! I’m wondering if I need to continually run the “go” page or if this refreshes automatically to pull in new data from feeds?

Thanks again,
Emily

14.
4th Feb 2007 at 10:44 am

Hi Emily,

You’ll need to run the ‘go’ page to update unfortunately. I use a ‘cron’ job to periodically hit the page.

15. mmo
14th Mar 2008 at 9:48 am

Thanks for the plugin! working great for one of my blog sites.

16. ALL IN ONE FORUM
23rd Mar 2008 at 9:35 am

Thanks for the great plugin

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