The unique=“title,date” parameter is actually the default behaviour. Possibly the feed’s title or timestamp changes and you get duplicates because of that.
I tend to find that a lot of RSS feeds have a unique field to check on, often called something like guid. I set up a custom field (called, say, feed_guid) and import the feed’s guid into it and use the parameter unique=“feed_guid”.
Thanks Andrew, I did see your documentation on GUIDs. Was hoping the “title,date” stuff would work and I did explicitly invoke that parameter after my last post. It’s off to visit GUIDs then!
Thanks for the plugin. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it works very well. One feature request, though, could you add the ability to automatically update the last_entry_date in exp_weblogs? Thanks.
Andrew, your plugin rocks… but add me to the list of people who can’t get the “offset” parameter to work. My Twitter posts are two hours earlier than they should be, so I’ve tried offset=“2”, offset=”-2” and offset=”+2”—nothing seemed to happen for any of those. How should I be formatting this instead?
1. Is the offset parameter in minutes or hours? I’m having odd results, hard to explain, but it jumps a whole day even though I’ve only changed it by two hours or so, it seems to ignore the day of the month. Can it do negative time as wel?
2. All of a sudden i am getting this error when my feedgrab page runs.. it just started happening for no reason (that i can tell, on my end)
Fetching: http://www.mysite.com/boards/news.xml
Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to fetch http://www.mysite.com/boards/news.xml (HTTP Error: connection failed (11) in /home/usr/public_html/dir/system/plugins/pi.feedgrab.php on line 1784
put an invalid value in the date=”” parameter, such as title or something else. I then used the offset parameter to adjust the time zones of the feeds to match my servers time zone (for my case, i have 7 feeds i want to all be on the servers time zone)
I still have the above error and have looked into it on my side. We had our php updated by thre are no settings that should be affecting this particular feed, so perhaps its on the other sites end.
Briggs, any chance you could post some of your code? I’m still having trouble with timestamps on FeedGrab’d data, and I can’t get the offset parameter to work at all.
In order for me to get all entries to have entry dates that were all in the same time zone (my servers time zone), this is what 1 of my “grabs” looks like. There are actually 7 of them in this page.
{exp:feedgrab url="http://www.mysite.com/boards/news.xml" weblog="9" category="8" title="title" <----- Invalid value makes FeedGrab insert a default time date="title" offset="-21620" <-------- modifies the entry date in seconds so it matches my servers time use="link|description" fields="feed_url|feed_desc" unique="feed_url"}
Also I should mention that I had to play around with the time settings in EE quite a lot. ACross the board I made sure that the time settings were always CDT and always the time zone of my server, even if you are China. Cookies have localized time, but when they are used in a page they are changed to my CDT time (I’m new with cookies, maybe that’s default behaviour). I’m pretty novice in php so I wanted to make sure everything was in the same time so ic oudl play with cookies and date times of entries.
I’m new to using FeedGrab. Though, I did skim through all six pages of forum comments, I couldn’t find anything that address two questions I have:
(1) Is it possible to declare ‘source’ either to grab it from the feed or hand code it into the {exp:feedgrab} data?
I’m looking to pull data from multiple sources, and want to make sure that the source is properly attributed on my site.
(2) Can other plugins be used with the FeedGrab plugin?
Mostly I’m interested in stripping HTML, and limited words or characters. For example, one source that we are pulling data from allows full HTML, including style sheet overrides. Since we want the display to be very specific size and format, this isn’t great. I know I can clean it up, specifically on display, with the plugin, I’m just wondering if it could be cleaned before going into the system.
You can use other plugins like html strip and what not, but it does not work perfectly, or I have not spent enough time with it yet. Sometimes i get weird character codes. But you can certainly get somewhere with it.
Yeah, I’ve notice some strange character codes, when I use the plugin on output, but I haven’t tried on input yet. I assume you would wrap it around the source field like:
