RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom feed gen available

[petefinnigan]

Hi All

I have completed my modifications to gm-rss and have issued a new version. This is version 2.0.

I have added a new page to my own website to release this code. It is based on version 1.3.1 of the script. The original 1.3.1 script is no longer supported by the original author.

I am happy to support and answer questions based on the new version 2.0.0 of gm-rss.

The original code has simply been extended and supplemented rather than doing a re-write.

I plan to rewrite the RSS / Atom feed generation code for GM soon. The existing code is very monolithic and needs improving. It currently uses a span class to identify the feed text. This is not ideal as for a generic solution any peice of text should be suitable and extractable for adding toa feed.

This new version supports RSS1.0, RSS2.0 and Atom 0.3 for full posts and also for "taster" entries using the same technique as in the original gm-rss.

In the near future I want to re-write, add Atom 1.0, modularise and also remove the need for span class rss:item to be added. I also want to add support for feeds of comments, posts plus comments and.... well basically allow feed generation to be added to anywhere easily in gm.

I have created some nice new icons, three in fact, one for each feed type.

I have fixed a bug in the original rss1.0 feed (actually its an RDF feed). I have validated all three feeds as generated by my feeble blog so they are clean. That doesnt mean that all feeds generated by anyone will stay clean. I had to fix the date generation to RFC-822 and email generation to RFC-2822 and also the image size. I also had a post that included html in the title, this balked the feed validator but not the generator. In futiure i would like to add support to remove html from all parts of the feed text so it wont break the validator.

The original feed site includes details of how to automate the running of gm-rss.cgi, this is still valid.

I have made a change to the perl to use the dest_name parameter of the configuration file gm-rssconfig.cfg in a differnet way. In the old version this parameter had to have the file extension .rdf. This is no longer the case. the parameter should not not include a file extension:

# The name of the destination/outputfile file. Do not include a file extension
dest_name = example_file_name

This is because the perl now generates three files, .rdf for rss 1.0, .rss for rss2.0 and .xml for atom.

There are also dependanices on various shipped Perl packages such as xml::rss, xml::atom::simplefeed, xml::parser and xml::simple.

If your ISP does not include these packages it can be difficult to use gm-rss. Either get the ISP to install them, install them yourself if you have privileges or follow my method.

I tracked down each perl package on CPAN and saved the code as a {name}.pm file and removed the shebang lines. All i needed to do then is comment out the "use" lines for the packages and add a require line instead pointing at the .pm file location. I installed mine in a non web accessible directory.

I will check into the license for the perl packages (I think I can redistribute them) and if its OK then I will also ship the packages to make it much easier for anyone to install and use gm-rss.

As I said I will re-write the feed generation completely so that it can be built in. one of the key things is to get rid of the dependanicies on these packages. Also I would like to get rid of the dependancies on adding span rss:item tags to the templates. This is OK for a quick script but not for a professional built in solution. I would also like to make it completely modular to allow feed generation from any part of gm. I want to support atom 1.0 as well rather than atom 0.3.

Any questions, support, features, chnages, let me know.

cheers

Pete

The download is at web.petefinnigan.com/gm-rss.htm

[amiiss]

Would like:
1- European Language support
2- Readable Documentation that wraps in Notepad.

3- Integration with Greymatter
4- and yes, getting rid of the <rss-span> kludge would be nice..

[aguardx]

Hi Pete,

I've install the RSS mod you have done, I follow the instruction on your web page and on the readme file, I think all seems to work fine with feeds RDF and RSS, but get errors with XML and I can't validate with :http://feedvalidator.org/

Is there any modification to do on the files: XML-Parser.pm and XML-Simple.pm?

thx

[petefinnigan]

Hi

can you post a link so that i can test your feed myself and see what the issue is?

cheers

Pete

[aguardx]

Hi there,

Here is the link to my website:
www.salsanight.ca/index2.html

and the link of xml feed are:
www.salsanight.ca/salsanight_web.xml

[aguardx]

I forget to tell you
when following the readme file it asked to put

<span class="rss:item">
<P>
{{entrymainbody}}
</p>
</span>

at the entry Page-Related Templates, doing this will remove the {{entrymainbody}} from the extended pages...to fix this I double the line leave {{entrymainbody}} alone and adding
<span class="rss:item">
<P>
{{entrymainbody}}
</p>
</span> fix my problem on the extend part....weird no?

Hope my english isn't too bad ;-)

[petefinnigan]

Hi,

I have had a look at your feed issues. The first thing is that feedvalidator.org doesnt support Atom 0.3. I have checked your feed on another validator and found that the issue for the Aom 0.3 feed is that you are using French accent characters and these are not supported in the Perl XML::Atom::Simplefeed package and the docs say that there are no plans to support them.

In the short term i cannot see a way to easily fix the Atom feed. Longer term these feeds are on my todo list and will be completely rewritten to be part of gm and to not use the external libraries. I aslo will fix the documentation, add proper language support and get rid of the rss:span kludge.

Your RSS2 and RDF feeds work fine with the French characters.

I would say that if you need to have the Atom 0.3 feed as well than maybe consider either using ASCII characters only so the feed will work?

sorry to not be much help at this stage.

cheers

Pete

[aguardx]

Thanks Pete for the info, I've think about the french accent on this issue but wasn't sure... because of the rss and rdf was working...

Ok so I'll try to modify the accents by ASCII character and I'll gave you news about it

[robshaw]

Hello.
you mentioned the modules i need installed on my server. Unfortunatly they cannot install two modules for me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your support enquiry.

XML Parser, CGI and CGI Carp are installed on our Linux shared servers.

XML RSS, XML Simple and XML Atom: Simplified are not installed on our shared
servers.

Unfortunately we will not be able to install these modules for you.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Does this mean that RSS and Atom is totally out of the question for me? Its not a must have for me, but i thought it would be pretty cool thats all. Would like to install it just for self experiment. But if its out of the question then its no problem.

[petefinnigan]

Hi Rob,

You can still do it. I did this myself. see web.petefinnigan.com/gm-rss.htm for some details. let me know how you get on.

cheers

Pete

[robshaw]

Hey Pete.

When i do www.rob-shaw.org.uk/cgi-bin/gm-rss.cgi I get a 500 Internal Error. Everything has been CHMODed correctly also.

In the read me file it says that the requirments are to have all of those modules installed. And my web hosts cant install some of these for me.. is that not a problem? I dont understand anything about this sort of stuff to be honest.

I have tried both ways on web.petefinnigan.com/gm-rss.htm but still no luck.

Sorry for being a pain!
Do you have any ideas?

Thanks RobShaw

[scottlindberg]

Here's another question for you, Pete ...

Is there a way to hardcode the <link> for each generated feed to the front page of my site rather than link it to the Local Log Path URL?

For example, right now the <link> in my feed goes to www.sllab.net/news, but I want to make it go to www.sllab.net (the weblog in question is being inserted into my front page as an SSI, and a site visitor going to the /news/ directory gets a 403 Forbidden error).

Is this something I could accomplish by editing gm-rss.cgi each place it reads ...

link => "$archives_link"."/"."$k.$entry_suffix",

and change it to ...

link => "http://www.sllab.net",

or would that mess things up? Is there a better way to accomplish this? I'm using gm-rss version 2.0.0 for now, but will be upgrading as soon as I update my core gm installation.

Thanks for your help.

[coldstone]

RobShaw: without the required modules, it will not work. I believe there is information on how to installl the files locally though (your webhost wouldn't do that, you would).

[aldiaur]

I am trying to upgrade from an earlier version of gm-rss and I think I have most of the pieces together, but I am getting an error message when trying to run the app from a browser (and the rss,rdf,xml files aren't being filled):

Software error:

Can't modify concatenation (.) or string in scalar assignment at xml_atom_simplefeed.pm line 57, near "0;"
Compilation failed in require at gm-rss.cgi line 56.


Unfortunately I don't really know much about perl and so don't know how to address this issue. It appeared to me that my host doesn't have the module XML::Atom::Simplefeed, so I followed the instructions at web.petefinnigan.com/gm-rss.htm to get around this; but not changing anything about XML::RSS (when I did adjust this one too I got many lines of error).

Any thoughts? Thanks,

Jesse