The RSS Importer and Google Reader

[deguello]

I wanted to share a solution with everyone on story import with the RSS importer. I think the importer is a great tool, and I use it daily to propagate stories on my site. But, as my site is a general news community, I found the importer was not flexible in the fact that it publishes the number of stories I tell it to from the source resulting in some stories being placed that I don't want. Because I found that my importer was starting to become very large in the number of sources I was calling to, I started looking around for an RSS pool that would fit my needs.

I think I found it in the Google News Reader. What looks like a very simple RSS reader, is in fact a very powerful source aggreator also. It works like this:

From your Google Reader, you subscribe to all the RSS feed sources you want. At the bottom of each story is a button called "Share". When you share a story it is published to another page that is generated so you are able to publish those stories to a blog. Better still, there is an option to publish those stories as a feed that works well with the Pligg RSS importer. This allows me to be specific with the stories I want, and to upload them in a bulk fashion.

If you don't use it, you can find it at http://www.google.com/reader

I hope this is useful to others and I would be interested in your alternatives.

Your importer should look like this:

Feed Name: My READER
Feed URL: http://www.google.com/reader/public/...ogle/broadcast
Delete this feed

- Feed Frequency (hours): 12 -- how often to check for new items.
- Feed Votes: 1 -- how many votes new items recieve (limit 200)
- Feed Items Limit: 15 -- how many new items to take from the feed when it's checked
- Feed URL Dupes: 0 -- Allow duplicate URL's 0=No, 1=Yes, Allow
- Feed Title Dupes: 0 -- Allow duplicate Title's 0=No, 1=Yes, Allow
- Feed Submitter Id (number): 2 -- The ID of the person who will be listed as the submitter
- Feed Category Id (number): 5 -- The ID of the category to place these items into

-- feed field name: title --- pligg field name: link_title --- Remove this link
-- feed field name: link --- pligg field name: link_url --- Remove this link
-- feed field name: id --- pligg field name: link_content --- Remove this link

[kbeeveer46]

Cool, so you're basically grabbing all your feeds and putting them in this google reader and then the only feed that you're using on your Pligg site is the google reader feed which grabs all the rest?

[jitgos]

Wow that's a great idea! I love google reader.

[deguello]

Originally Posted by kbeeveer46

Cool, so you're basically grabbing all your feeds and putting them in this google reader and then the only feed that you're using on your Pligg site is the google reader feed which grabs all the rest?

Yes, but you have to go through your feeds in google reader and add fresh content or the Pligg importer will not pick up new stories...it allows for a tighter control of what feed stories do end up on your site.

Just a different way to get mass stories uploaded...

[robaubie]

When I use this method, it does import the posts, but with problems. I followed your example exactly.

Upon import, the posts come in with the following:

- the link to the post is a combination of the full link to the post, immediately followed by the base URL of the site it comes from

- the excerpt is actually a Google Reader ID tag / string

Are there some settings to the Pligg installation that I am missing? have not changed?

My site is a class exercise for my students. http://www.marcomblog.com/meme/

Thank you.

Rob

Originally Posted by robaubie

Feed Name: Shared posts from my Google Reader account
Feed URL: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/..../broadcast
Delete this feed

- Feed Frequency (hours): 12 -- how often to check for new items.
- Feed Votes: 1 -- how many votes new items recieve (limit 200)
- Feed Items Limit: 10 -- how many new items to take from the feed when it's checked
- Feed URL Dupes: 0 -- Allow duplicate URL's 0=No, 1=Yes, Allow
- Feed Title Dupes: 0 -- Allow duplicate Title's 0=No, 1=Yes, Allow
- Feed Submitter Id (number): 2 -- The ID of the person who will be listed as the submitter
- Feed Category Id (number): 2 -- The ID of the category to place these items into

-- feed field name: title --- pligg field name: link_title --- Remove this link
-- feed field name: link --- pligg field name: link_url --- Remove this link
-- feed field name: id --- pligg field name: link_content --- Remove this link

[deguello]

I came back this morning to let people know about this. I imported a fresh set of stories and it appears that feeds are being imported and the base url is being attached to the link on the site as you explained in your post.

EX: A link to a story would be -

http://www.pligg.com/story?1928/g^837.html

The google reader feed page is formed correctly. It appears that the Pligg RSS Importer is adding the base url to the story link so a submitted story link will read -


http://www.pligg.com/story?1928/g^837.htmlhttp://www.pligg.com(added to posted story url)

giving viewers a 404 error when they try to visit the story site.

I am guessing that there is a function in the feed field name that should not be there, but I have been unable to find it. If it makes any difference the feed generated by Google Reader is an atom feed.

Any of you feed Gurus know the answer?

[alanapost]

I'm having this problem, now, too. Initially I was looking for a solution to my problem with Magpie not recognizing a group feed on Upcoming.org (I was looking to pull in events I listed on that site instead of duplicating my efforts). Google Reader recognized it and pulled in events, and I used a tag to make everything from Upcoming public. Magpie liked Google Reader's feed url, so I thought it was doing all right, but it doesn't pull anything [when I manually run it].

Feed Name: Upcoming.org
Feed URL: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/08966848509713638635/label/mh
Delete this feed

- Feed Frequency (hours): 12 -- how often to check for new items.
- Feed Votes: 1 -- how many votes new items recieve (limit 200)
- Feed Items Limit: 10 -- how many new items to take from the feed when it's checked
- Feed URL Dupes: 0 -- Allow duplicate URL's 0=No, 1=Yes, Allow
- Feed Title Dupes: 0 -- Allow duplicate Title's 0=No, 1=Yes, Allow
- Feed Submitter Id (number): 3 -- The ID of the person who will be listed as the submitter
- Feed Category Id (number): 6 -- The ID of the category to place these items into

-- feed field name: title --- pligg field name: link_title
-- feed field name: link --- pligg field name: link_url
-- feed field name: summary --- pligg field name: link_content

I was also wondering if there's a limit to how much the RSS Importer will bring in, since I have added a large number of feeds (4-5 very small, specialized ones, and 2 with about 15 items per cycle) and it seems that by the end of the page it just stops generating information about what it's doing. For example, it will list, in large type, the name of the feed, and brief summaries of whether or not it's importing or skipping each item, continuing on down the line, but eventually will just list the title of a feed and nothing beneath it.

Is it stopping on the feed, denoting an error? Or is it not running it because it's terminating for another reason? I don't know anything about Magpie so I'm hoping someone who does can answer these questions.

[sujit75]

Yahoo Pipes seems to be lot powerful option than google reader.

[samoolee]

EX: A link to a story would be -

http://www.pligg.com/story?1928/g^837.html

The google reader feed page is formed correctly. It appears that the Pligg RSS Importer is adding the base url to the story link so a submitted story link will read -


http://www.pligg.com/story?1928/g^837.htmlhttp://www.pligg.com(added to posted story url)

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anyone can fix this? thanks