By Stephen on Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Posted in General Issues
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I am trying to replace Feedburner as the preferred way of importing RSS feeds on many of my sites.
I have Easyblog as the main blog package on our main site ncadd.org it supports a number of different categories and these are really stand alone blogs.
The site has many affiliate organizations who pick up the various blogs through RSS feeds and these all work through various readers in both Joomla, Wordpress and others.
If I try to use the Easyblog RSS Feed Importer for a category feed from the main sites easy blog I get the message "There is nothing to be imported from the remote site currently." The same feed opens in a browser and Feedgator RSS feed and also passes the http://feedvalidator.org test. If I use the RSS feed URL suggested for the Google Feedburner section of General Settings / RSS Feeds that will successfully import all the latest blogs. But I do not want the latest blogs, I want blogs from each of the categories.
So this link will work
https://ncadd.org/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=latest&format=feed&type=rss
This link works for other readers but not the Easyblog feed import
https://ncadd.org/index.php/?option=com_easyblog&view=categories&layout=listings&id=3&format=feed&type=rss
This is the SEO version of the above and it does not work either
https://ncadd.org/blogs/addiction-medicine?format=feed&type=rss
Can you test the feeds with your versions and perhaps advice what I am doing wrong?
Hi Stephen,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply.

I notice the feed url that you provided have an extra slash before the ?option. Can you try to use the following feed url instead and see how it goes?
https://ncadd.org/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=categories&layout=listings&id=3&format=feed&type=rss
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Tuesday, 15 December 2015 12:21
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Guys,
Thanks for looking. Well spotted. Not sure this was a problem because up to reading your reply I was using the incorrect URL and after some time it did upload posts. But I have corrected the issue.
So I now have posts imported from one site to another with mixed results. Images are a bit of a problem because all formatting is stripped so there are no margins or float carried across. The main images obviously do not become a cover image, but if they are big enough they format themselves OK as a full width image. The images inside the articles are the biggest issue.
I have a second issue, not such a problem for your product but a killer if I try to use other modules specifically the GK5 NewsPro. When you put the main content into your database you seem to leave in a number of non-printing characters, possibly line feeds. These do not show up on the blog posts because the page formater ignores them, and if you ever edit such an imported post the editor cleans up and strips them out. GK5 see's these characters as space and so does not display any text. Interesting also if you export the database as a spread sheet (CSV} it also outputs an empty info/content cell. But I have attached the post database as a sql table. If you load this into any database you will see the extra space in the intro section. I have manually fixed some of the posts so look around. I suspect you could add some clean up code to your feed importer to solve this issue.
If you can help fix the extra characters I might be able to use the feed importer, but I have to conclude that the more advanced RSS feeds like Feedgator do have tools to fix images and formatting. Shame I had high hopes to get rid of that unsupported component.
I have also added you as a user to the test site so you can go look if you have time.
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Wednesday, 16 December 2015 10:49
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Guys,
Thanks for looking. Well spotted. Not sure this was a problem because up to reading your reply I was using the incorrect URL and after some time it did upload posts. But I have corrected the issue.
So I now have posts imported from one site to another with mixed results. Images are a bit of a problem because all formatting is stripped so there are no margins or float carried across. The main images obviously do not become a cover image, but if they are big enough they format themselves OK as a full width image. The images inside the articles are the biggest issue.
I have a second issue, not such a problem for your product but a killer if I try to use other modules specifically the GK5 NewsPro. When you put the main content into your database you seem to leave in a number of non-printing characters, possibly line feeds. These do not show up on the blog posts because the page formater ignores them, and if you ever edit such an imported post the editor cleans up and strips them out. GK5 see's these characters as space and so does not display any text. Interesting also if you export the database as a spread sheet (CSV} it also outputs an empty info/content cell. But I have attached the post database as a sql table. If you load this into any database you will see the extra space in the intro section. I have manually fixed some of the posts so look around. I suspect you could add some clean up code to your feed importer to solve this issue.
If you can help fix the extra characters I might be able to use the feed importer, but I have to conclude that the more advanced RSS feeds like Feedgator do have tools to fix images and formatting. Shame I had high hopes to get rid of that unsupported component.
I have also added you as a user to the test site so you can go look if you have time.
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Wednesday, 16 December 2015 10:50
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Hi Stephen,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply.

By default easyblog will only fetch the introtext of each blog post that listed inside the rss feed. If you want to fetch the full information of the blog, you need to enable the following settings from your backend > easyblog > feed importer > your feed > publishing details > get full text from feed set to "Yes", http://screencast.com/t/fDhduuKK .

However do note that you must always set "Feed Amount" with a low value to avoid any timeout issue when easyblog trying to fetch the blog, http://screencast.com/t/uAJViVEO since it will take a longer time process the feed when full text from feed option is enabled.

Hope these help.
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Wednesday, 16 December 2015 18:23
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I am sorry but your reply does not address the problem. You have just sent me standard reply that does not even relate to my questions.
I am able to follow configuration details and so have already understood the need for asking for the full test and transferred over 100 blog entries without issue.
My questions were about the image formatting and the extra non-printing characters that get transferred. The main problem being that your code does not seem to clean up these extra characters which causes problems.
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Wednesday, 16 December 2015 22:56
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Hey Stephen,

Sorry but I have been reading the entire thread several times but I am a little clueless about your issue except for the "extra non printing characters". Pardon me if I am asking this again:

1. Which is the main site and which is the site that is trying to import the RSS feed?
2. When you mentioned the "extra non printing characters", where can I see them? I am assuming that you are referring to the feed generated by EasyBlog on your main site, correct?
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Sunday, 20 December 2015 17:32
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Sorry for the confusion.
The feed is from an easyblog on ncadd.org they all work the same, there are several categories used as separate blogs on that site. These are syndicated to may different sites, all seems to work fine.
Many of the syndicated sites are also sites I build. I provide websites to many ncadd.org affiliates.
My current standard web build list uses a component called feedgator to receive the rss feeds and automatically create articles on their websites. Again all works fine, but feedgator is not supported and something I spend time keeping up to date.
I tried to use your easyblog Feed Importer to import rss feeds but had two problems.
[1] extra none-printing characters that appear at the beginning of the text. These cause a problem with the Gavick NewsPro5GK5 component. That component counts the non printing characters when deciding how much text to display which results in white space where there should be blog text. Imported blog posts look fine, they deal with the none printing characters.
[2] Images get imported from the rss feed buy they are difficult to style. Having the ability to add a class to images would be a great help in dealing with imported images.
So my original question was if you could strip these off as you import the feed text. I note that just opening the imported posts in an editor solves the issue, not practical but an indication of how basic this clean up is. I provided the dump of the database as a sql table inside a zip file. This will show the intro text with the extra characters. Some of the entries in that table will have been cleaned up but there are many that have not. You can also pull the feed from the ncadd.org site and check your own feed import. https://ncadd.org/blogs/addiction-medicine?format=feed&type=rss would be the link.
The test site I am currently building up as my next build standard has been put back to use feedgator for now. You have login credentials and the site is http://ncadd.biz/ncadd-sfv/index.php the current blog has the data from your feed. the articles in http://ncadd.biz/ncadd-sfv/index.php/2015-12-16-16-50-23/addiction-medicine-update have the data from feedgator.
So my intention was to flag this issue, you may choose to investigate and get it fixed. If so I would be happy,
I am investing a lot of time getting up to speed on EasyBlog, I basically like it although each of your updates seems to cause me pain. The last one today seemed to reset all the category display settings so I had to go in and reset them all again.
I hope this explanation has helped.
regards steve
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Tuesday, 22 December 2015 09:09
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Hey Stephen,

I am sorry for the inconveniences caused during each upgrades. We are actually addressing a lot of issues that we weren't aware of since EasyBlog 3.9.

By the way, I did try to import the contents from the url you provided and noticed that our connector doesn't seem to deal with gzip compressions as the output is garbled, http://screencast.com/t/fIrnDgl3Ze . I have applied a fix for this internally and managed to import these items.

Anyway, after importing, I don't seem to see these "whitespace" characters as you have mentioned. This is an export from phpmyadmin after the items were migrated internally. Take a look at my screen dump here, http://screencast.com/t/ryk2Sm7wbjz

As for the image classes, unfortunately there is no way to actually enforce a class on image tags right now but you can edit the file /components/com_easyblog/views/latest/view.feed.php and locate the codes below:



Then, add the respective class accordingly.


P/S: I am not too sure if the "whitespace" that you are talking about was due to our crawler that doesn't support gzip compressions but perhaps you can try downloading the attached file and uploading it into /administrator/components/com_easyblog/includes/connector/
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Thursday, 24 December 2015 15:43
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Guys,
Thanks for following up. I tried changing the connector code by replacing the original. I thne imported a bunch of items using the feed. I think I got the same results. I have copied screen captures. The first is the full post table, you can see all the intro sections look blank. The second is the first post in edit view. This shows the white space before the image details, this is the non-printing stuff I refer to. Now if you open that post in the easyblog editor, it is seen to remove that "stuff" and show a normal article. Then after saving I show you the same database entry.
So I am confident the issue remains, and as I said the unfortunate issue for me is that the third party promo display modules count these characters so miss out displaying real content.
I have also uploaded the full post table. You already have the link for the RS feed I was using.
So hope this helps, more than willing to help more if I can.
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Friday, 25 December 2015 00:43
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Guys,
Thanks for following up. I tried changing the connector code by replacing the original. I thne imported a bunch of items using the feed. I think I got the same results. I have copied screen captures. The first is the full post table, you can see all the intro sections look blank. The second is the first post in edit view. This shows the white space before the image details, this is the non-printing stuff I refer to. Now if you open that post in the easyblog editor, it is seen to remove that "stuff" and show a normal article. Then after saving I show you the same database entry.
So I am confident the issue remains, and as I said the unfortunate issue for me is that the third party promo display modules count these characters so miss out displaying real content.
I have also uploaded the full post table (had to be zip because you disallow .sql). You already have the link for the RS feed I was using.
So hope this helps, more than willing to help more if I can.
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Friday, 25 December 2015 00:45
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Hey Stephen,

What is the link that you added in your feed import? I would like to test this internally as I cannot seem to reproduce this issue here. All the imported posts doesn't have the "whitespace" that you mentioned.

1. This is my current feed import settings for this feed, http://screencast.com/t/TcrQT8Dn

2. This is the output from phpmyadmin, http://screencast.com/t/I7iZvsBUq
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Monday, 28 December 2015 00:42
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The feed is currently https://ncadd.org/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=categories&layout=listings&id=2&format=feed&type=rss
This should give me the required category and is the same URL I use in Feedgator
When you provided the modified connector code I imported a bunch of new posts, they had the white space and motivated me to send my last mail.
You have access to the site as a superuser, it is now running your latest update so may no longer have the modified connector software. You can check the white space on the test site by just opening a post in the blog editor, briefly you see the code as it gets cleaned up. If you were to look at phpmyadmin you would see the space as my screen shots suggest.
If I can help more I will, I can probably create a site on my test server and get you full access, but all things being equal you should be able to see the problem. Be warned that opening an imported post inside the editor and saving it will clean up the problem.
regards steve
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Monday, 28 December 2015 00:53
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Update, the other blog, In the News has more content so has changed more frequently so i also suggest using that. Using the seo version of the url seems to make no difference.

Using no editor lets me get the raw content:
Starts here:






<a class="eb-post-image eb-image-popup-button" href="http://ncadd.org/images/easyblog_articles/1473/Poison---19364328.jpg" title="American Association of Poison Control Centers Releases 32nd Annual Report of the National Poison Data System" target="_blank">
<img src="http://ncadd.org/images/easyblog_articles/1473/b2ap3_large_Poison---19364328.jpg" alt="American Association of Poison Control Centers Releases 32nd Annual Report of the National Poison Data System" /></a>





<p>The recently published 32nd Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ National Poison Data System (NPDS) reveals that in 2014, someone called a poison center about every 11 seconds.</p>
<p>America’s poison centers managed almost 3 million cases, over two million of which were human exposure cases.</p>
<p>The American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) maintains the National Poison Data System, the data repository for the nation’s 55 poison centers.<br />Approximately half of all human exposure cases managed by poison centers in 2014 involved children younger than six years, but as in previous years, many of the more serious cases occurred among adolescents and adults.</p>
<p>While overall incoming call volume to poison centers continues to decrease, cases with more serious clinical outcomes (moderate, major, or death) have increased by 4.29 percent per year since 2000..</p>
<p>In 2014, around 57 percent of all exposure cases involved pharmaceuticals.</p>
<p>Common scenarios for unintentional pharmaceutical exposures included inadvertent double-dosing, wrong medication taken or given, other incorrect dosage, doses given/taken too close together, and inadvertent exposure to someone else’s medication.</p>
<p>Other exposures were to household products, plants, mushrooms, pesticides, animal bites and stings, carbon monoxide, and many other types of non-pharmaceutical substances.</p>
<p>Also similar to previous years, in 2014 most calls to poison centers originated from a residence, and the majority of exposures were treated at the site of exposure.<br />In 2014, 21 percent of exposure calls came from health care facilities. “Calls to poison centers originating from health care facilities are an increasingly significant proportion of overall poison center exposure call volume, speaking to the increasing clinical complexity of the types of cases that the experts at poison centers help to manage,” said Jay L. Schauben, PharmD, DABAT, FAACT, report author, Director of the Florida Poison Information Center in Jacksonville, and current AAPCC President. “Health care providers such as emergency department clinicians, first responders, pharmacists, and others increasingly rely on the experts at poison centers for immediate, evidence-based treatment advice about known or suspected exposures to dangerous substances.”</p>
<p>Other findings in the report include:</p>
The substance classes most frequently involved in human exposures were analgesics (11.3 percent), cosmetics/personal care products (7.7 percent), household cleaning substances (7.7 percent), sedatives/hypnotics/antipsychotics (5.9 percent), and antidepressants (4.4 percent).
Unintentional exposures outnumbered intentional exposures in all age groups except in the age category of 13-19 years.
Schools were the site of over 27,000 exposures. However, only about 10,000 calls to poison centers were made from schools.
<p>The 32nd annual report issued by the American Association of Poison Control Centers will be published in the December issue of Clinical Toxicology and is available at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.aapcc.org">www.aapcc.org</a>.</p>
<p>Source: News-Medical.net</p>

<div><a href="https://ncadd.org/blogs/in-the-news/entry/american-association-of-poison-control-centers-releases-32nd-annual-report-of-the-national-poison-data-system" target="_blank">Original link</a></div><div>Original author: Ezra</div>



After the editor has cleaned up this is what I get:

<p><a href="http://ncadd.org/images/easyblog_articles/1473/Poison---19364328.jpg" target="_blank" class="eb-post-image eb-image-popup-button" title="American Association of Poison Control Centers Releases 32nd Annual Report of the National Poison Data System"> <img src="http://ncadd.org/images/easyblog_articles/1473/b2ap3_large_Poison---19364328.jpg" alt="American Association of Poison Control Centers Releases 32nd Annual Report of the National Poison Data System" /></a></p>
<p>The recently published 32nd Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ National Poison Data System (NPDS) reveals that in 2014, someone called a poison center about every 11 seconds.</p>
<p>America’s poison centers managed almost 3 million cases, over two million of which were human exposure cases.</p>
<p>The American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) maintains the National Poison Data System, the data repository for the nation’s 55 poison centers.<br />Approximately half of all human exposure cases managed by poison centers in 2014 involved children younger than six years, but as in previous years, many of the more serious cases occurred among adolescents and adults.</p>
<p>While overall incoming call volume to poison centers continues to decrease, cases with more serious clinical outcomes (moderate, major, or death) have increased by 4.29 percent per year since 2000..</p>
<p>In 2014, around 57 percent of all exposure cases involved pharmaceuticals.</p>
<p>Common scenarios for unintentional pharmaceutical exposures included inadvertent double-dosing, wrong medication taken or given, other incorrect dosage, doses given/taken too close together, and inadvertent exposure to someone else’s medication.</p>
<p>Other exposures were to household products, plants, mushrooms, pesticides, animal bites and stings, carbon monoxide, and many other types of non-pharmaceutical substances.</p>
<p>Also similar to previous years, in 2014 most calls to poison centers originated from a residence, and the majority of exposures were treated at the site of exposure.<br />In 2014, 21 percent of exposure calls came from health care facilities. “Calls to poison centers originating from health care facilities are an increasingly significant proportion of overall poison center exposure call volume, speaking to the increasing clinical complexity of the types of cases that the experts at poison centers help to manage,” said Jay L. Schauben, PharmD, DABAT, FAACT, report author, Director of the Florida Poison Information Center in Jacksonville, and current AAPCC President. “Health care providers such as emergency department clinicians, first responders, pharmacists, and others increasingly rely on the experts at poison centers for immediate, evidence-based treatment advice about known or suspected exposures to dangerous substances.”</p>
<p>Other findings in the report include:</p>
<p>The substance classes most frequently involved in human exposures were analgesics (11.3 percent), cosmetics/personal care products (7.7 percent), household cleaning substances (7.7 percent), sedatives/hypnotics/antipsychotics (5.9 percent), and antidepressants (4.4 percent). Unintentional exposures outnumbered intentional exposures in all age groups except in the age category of 13-19 years. Schools were the site of over 27,000 exposures. However, only about 10,000 calls to poison centers were made from schools.</p>
<p>The 32nd annual report issued by the American Association of Poison Control Centers will be published in the December issue of Clinical Toxicology and is available at <a href="http://www.aapcc.org" target="_blank">http://www.aapcc.org</a>.</p>
<p>Source: News-Medical.net</p>
<div><a href="https://ncadd.org/blogs/in-the-news/entry/american-association-of-poison-control-centers-releases-32nd-annual-report-of-the-national-poison-data-system" target="_blank">Original link</a></div>
<div>Original author: Ezra</div>
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Monday, 28 December 2015 01:10
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Hi Stephen,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply.

I am able to replicate the issue when I tried to import a feed from the url that you provided above. Here is my screenshot, http://screencast.com/t/KMWSuDvE . I believe this is caused by the feed site itself since our easyblog feed importer will directly fetch the content based on the page html. See my screenshot of the page here that already contain extra spacing here, http://screencast.com/t/z5aFyEQ7zcx .

We are still investigating on the issue and we will try to add a function that can clean up extra spacing everytime the blog is imported from feed. We will keep you updated with the issue.
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Tuesday, 29 December 2015 13:51
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Ezrul,
Thanks for persisting with this issue. Obviously the feed is from an Easyblog source which I believe to be set up OK. My experience with Feedgator suggests that clean up of the feed is important and it does produce the required results. best of luck I hope you get a result.
regards steve
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Tuesday, 29 December 2015 22:03
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Hey Stephen,

Okay it seems this issue only persists when the option "Get full text" is enabled when you are using the feed and unfortunately there is actually no real way to "trim" these preceeding whitespaces because we are dealing with html codes here and regex tends to fail for HTML because of the repetitive html codes.

Anyway, this is something that you can try. I have tried to compress the output into a single line hoping that this would remove the spaces (Not sure if this causes any other issues) that is generated when the script crawls the content from your site.

Download the attached file and upload it into /administrator/components/com_easyblog/includes/feeds/adapters/
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Wednesday, 30 December 2015 00:24
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