Add Elements To ReadFeed

TeamSDA1 · May 14, 2011, 8:44pm

We are wanting to use the ReadFeed action for a church website to publish sermon audio files with Date, Title and Description. We have found some great RSS generator code to build the back end from but are having trouble getting all the elements to show up using ReadFeed.

LINKto generator code:

How do we add elements so we can pull all the content over, Date, Title, Description, Player and such?

Look forward to your input, Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 14, 2011, 10:02pm

Just in case we were not clear… We were thinking the ReadFeed Action could be used as a way to display content dynamically. The link provided was one idea as to generate the RSS Feeds.

Dave

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waltd · May 14, 2011, 10:40pm

If you have an rss feed that is update automatically somewhere, ReadFeed will convert it to HTML and inject it into your Freeway page where you put it. The variables in the rss can be defined in one parameter in the Action, and the output template in another. Between these, you have tweezer-precise control over the entire process.

I’m not trying to sugar coat this, it’s not simple, and you need to read the XML from the feed, see what order the elements are presented in, and understand what you’re doing. It’s a programming language, albeit a very simple one.

Walter

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 12:33am

Hi Walt,

Have had no trouble getting the title and description working. Have tried adding date,info and so on but they don’t work. Have added %s for each new element.

What we are trying to have display is the Date, Info, Title, Description, Player and the Podcast acceptance. Any help would be appreciated.

Regards, Dave

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waltd · May 15, 2011, 2:03am

Could you please post a link to the feed rss file? I may be able to point you in the right direction. If you could also post your template copied from the Action as a Gist or Pastie, along with the list of variables you are trying to access, also copied and pasted so there’s no ambiguity.

Walter

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waltd · May 15, 2011, 2:25am

Actually, I looked back to your earlier message and saw the link to
the example page. I looked at it in BBEdit, and the feed is not a
normal RSS 2.0 feed or an Atom feed, so ReadFeed can’t do much with
it. The reader function I wrote in PHP would need to be adapted to
this format, as it doesn’t follow the form of a normal RSS feed at all.

Walter

On May 14, 2011, at 10:03 PM, waltd wrote:

Could you please post a link to the feed rss file? I may be able to
point you in the right direction. If you could also post your
template copied from the Action as a Gist or Pastie, along with the
list of variables you are trying to access, also copied and pasted
so there’s no ambiguity.

Walter

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 5:36am

Walt,

I will look at other feed generators. I landed on this one as it handles media and such. Sorry was not aware that it was not RSS 2.0. I also started looking at the RSS subject at w3schools to get some additional background. Thank you for your input on tis topic.

Regards, Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 6:10am

OK, had to go back to the Podcast Generator website to look further as this seems like a really simple and useful script package. I could not find anything that claimed RSS 2.0 compatibility but they did say “XML feed generated is fully compatible with Juice and iTunes, meets the w3c standards and supports iTunes specific tags!”

What are your thoughts about compatibility based on their statement.

Thank you, Dave

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waltd · May 15, 2011, 1:42pm

What they have passes the RSS2 validator with one warning, so it is
RSS2. But RSS, like any XML, is extensible with new made-up tags. I
have never tried to read a podcast feed like this before, so I can’t
say whether or not it will ever work in the ReadFeed parser. It’s
certainly not within the scope of the basic “out of the box” mode that
ReadFeed was written to support. All I can suggest is look at the RSS
code in a text editor, look at the names of the tags you want to
employ, make sure that you observe the precise letter-case and
spelling of the tags you list in the Action compared with the tags you
see in the RSS, and see if you can get one tag to work. Then try
another, and keep working at it until you get them all to work.

If you find that they don’t ever work, then it’s likely that the fact
that this feed is using namespaces – itunes:email instead of email –
is to blame, and the parser in ReadFeed won’t do for what you’re
trying to accomplish.

I recommend that you publish a link to this feed using one of the
normal and expected methods, for example adding a link to the head of
your page that follows the normal auto-discovery model. Look at any
thread page on the FreewayTalk site (view source) and you’ll see a
link tag like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" ... bunch more

code … />

This link tells Safari or any other RSS-aware browser to display a
button in the location bar allowing you to subscribe to the feed. You
can apply the same href found in that link tag to a button icon
visible on the page, just as I have done with the little orange feed
symbol at the top of each topic thread.

So using one or both of these techniques, you can allow your visitors
to subscribe to this feed, complete with iTunes-specific content, and
they will be able to appreciate all the beauty and wonder of that feed
directly. What you won’t get in this case is a section of HTML on your
visible page that updates with the content of that feed.

Walter

On May 15, 2011, at 2:10 AM, TeamSDA wrote:

OK, had to go back to the Podcast Generator website to look further
as this seems like a really simple and useful script package. I
could not find anything that claimed RSS 2.0 compatibility but they
did say “XML feed generated is fully compatible with Juice and
iTunes, meets the w3c standards and supports iTunes specific tags!”

What are your thoughts about compatibility based on their statement.

Thank you, Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 3:21pm

This is helpful. I did try pulling names into the elements filed of the action but was not able to get anything working as of yet.

Why do you the “Link” “Title” and “Description” element names that are in your action work?

Dave

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waltd · May 15, 2011, 3:31pm

Possibly because they are part of the rss spec. They have to be there, so they are part of the baseline for my reader. When you’re trying to add the other tags, are you including the namespace part of the tag name? (the part before the colon inside the tag name). If you do, try dropping the itunes: part and just use the part after that. I seem to recall that the XML parser built into PHP doesn’t do namespaces without coercion, so maybe it’s dropping that part.

Walter

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 3:58pm

Not sure if I am viewing the page code properly as I can only find class names for things like the date and such. I have tried View Frame Source and Inspect Element.

Dave

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waltd · May 15, 2011, 5:40pm

The code you have to inspect is the raw RSS code sent by the feed
generator, not the HTML generated by the Action. Here’s an example,
from the link you posted earlier.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/walterdavis/973345

gistfile1.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Podcast Generator 1.3" -->
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xml:lang="en" version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title>Podcast Generator DEMO</title>
		<link>http://www.podcastgenerator.net/demo/pg/</link>
		<description>This is the description of your podcast... you can change it through the administration area.</description>
		<generator>Podcast Generator 1.3 - http://podcastgen.sourceforge.net</generator>
		<lastBuildDate>Sat, 14 May 2011 22:08:37 +0200</lastBuildDate>
		<language>en</language>

This file has been truncated. show original

Then you need to pick through that line by line, note the names of the
tags you want to use, and put those into the Action interface in the
Elements input. Be sure to look only inside of the item tag in the
rss, so read through it until you see <item> in the code, then look
at each tag after that, look at its content and decide if you want to
publish it into HTML or not, and then keep on looking until you get to
the very first </item> after that first <item>.

The parser gathers a collection of item tags (and all of their nested
children) into an array, and then loops over them, interpreting them
for the variables you have set in the Elements field and then using
those variables, in that particular order you defined them, within
your template. Within the item tag, each sub-tag (child element) can
become a separate variable if you need it, but many of these tags are
going to be useless in the context of an HTML list of links and
descriptions.

You’re probably not going to be able to create an inline player widget
on the page, linked to the URL of the podcast file, not without some
serious rocket surgery (hire a programmer to configure the Action and
write the template code if you’re trying to do this). But you could
very easily use the link to that file as the href linked to the title
of the feed item. When a user clicks on it, her browser would
interpret the link and hand it off as appropriate to a helper
application like iTunes or WinAmp.

Walter

On May 15, 2011, at 11:58 AM, TeamSDA wrote:

Not sure if I am viewing the page code properly as I can only find
class names for things like the date and such. I have tried View
Frame Source and Inspect Element.

Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 8:41pm

Hi Walt,

I had been looking for the code you posted from the link but seem to be getting something entirely different. What steps did you take to view this code?

I see what you are saying about the Rocket Surgery… may be that I have uncovered what may be a great solution but just requires a much higher level of development expertise.

What do you think of Podcast Generator as a total solution. What I mean is to use it’s code inside of freeway to both create the backend as well as what is live to the world on the web page? Seems the code allows for subscribing and such.

I value your input, Dave

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waltd · May 15, 2011, 9:32pm

On May 15, 2011, at 4:41 PM, TeamSDA wrote:

Hi Walt,

I had been looking for the code you posted from the link but seem to
be getting something entirely different. What steps did you take to
view this code?

Open Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
Type mkdir -p Documents/testfeed; cd Documents/testfeed and press
Return
Type curl -O http://www.podcastgenerator.net/demo/pg/feed.xml and
press Return
(Since I have TextMate installed) type mate feed.xml and press
Return.

If you don’t have TextMate and have TextWrangler instead, substitute
edit for mate above.

This is the example code that you linked to earlier in this thread, if
you want to look at a different feed instead, then edit the URL you
use in the curl step to match the URL of the actual RSS feed.

I see what you are saying about the Rocket Surgery… may be that I
have uncovered what may be a great solution but just requires a much
higher level of development expertise.

What do you think of Podcast Generator as a total solution. What I
mean is to use it’s code inside of freeway to both create the
backend as well as what is live to the world on the web page? Seems
the code allows for subscribing and such.

I think if you can work out the issues of which tag means which symbol
in the Action interface equals which outer structure within the
template code in the Action, you could really have something here. It
does appear to make a good feed, as far as the validator goes, and
once you grasp the principles at work within the ReadFeed Action, you
should be able to consume it and transform it into a good-looking
dynamic widget on your pages. If the namespace issue I mentioned
earlier becomes too much of an issue, then you might have to use
something else, maybe one of the Yahoo YUI widgets, instead. There are
no Actions for this, and I have never tried it myself.

Walter

I value your input, Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 15, 2011, 9:47pm

Hi Walt, Thank you for the info on how to see the code using terminal. I found some documentation for Podcast Generator and it appears that they only have seven different tags that are standard RSS feed tags. I tried them in your ReadFead and they work just fine, The only issue is they don’t include things like the date, media and so on. Perhaps I need to be looking at using this code a complete solution and examine how to best work it into or Freeway workflow.

Thank you again for you input regarding all this, you have been most helpful.

Regards, Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 16, 2011, 1:19am

Hi Walt,

In an effort to do all this in freeway, I created a simple page using the FW RSS Feed action. It reads fine in the browser but I cant get pubDate to pull into ReadFeed action. Title and description work fine.

Any thoughts, Dave

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waltd · May 16, 2011, 1:47am

I just spotted a bug in my code, where I force all template parameters
to be lower-case, but I don’t enforce that elsewhere in the code. Just
change pubDate to pubdate in your Elements list and it will work. I’ll
try to push a new version of the Action tonight before I leave for
RailsConf.

Walter

On May 15, 2011, at 9:19 PM, TeamSDA wrote:

Hi Walt,

In an effort to do all this in freeway, I created a simple page
using the FW RSS Feed action. It reads fine in the browser but I
cant get pubDate to pull into ReadFeed action. Title and description
work fine.

Any thoughts, Dave

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TeamSDA1 · May 16, 2011, 2:23am

That was it. Have a great conference.

Regards, Dave

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