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ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Bloglines provides a link to retrieve lists of your shared blogroll, but it’s not formatted in a textpattern-friendly way. I tinkered with adding CSS to the divs that they provide in the list, but it didn’t work very well, so I set about putting together a plugin that would work a bit better.
ats_bloglines retrieves and formats a list of links provided by a shared Bloglines blogroll. Because of the hacked together method of removing the div codes provided by Bloglines, this version of the plugin doesn’t deal well with category separators — in fact, it removes them completely. So for now, I recommend specifying a folder when calling the plugin, and providing your own category heading outside of the plugin. (This fits my needs right now, but may not fit yours; improvements to the handling of categories are welcome!)
Usage: Accepts regular break and wrap tags, plus:
- (required) feedurl: the URL to the shared blogroll. feedurl=“http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=YOUR_ID&folder=FOLDER_NAME”
- (optional) poweredby: the “powered by” string to append to the list. If this is left empty, the default “Powered by Bloglines” string will be used. If poweredby=”“ is passed to the plugin, then no powered by tagline will be output.
You can see it in action on my site, where I have it displaying the list of “sociology” links in the left column.
Download ats_bloglines.txt.
Thanks to Zem for the info on dealing with wrap tags. Seems to work!
-Alan
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
I’m very excited to see this!
However, it’s not working for me.
The tag, as I tried to use it, was < txp:ats_bloglines feedurl=“php-feed-generated-by-bloglines” / > – this simply stopped the page from loading.
Did I miss something elementary?
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
> Jennifer wrote:
> The tag, as I tried to use it, was < txp:ats_bloglines feedurl=“php-feed-generated-by-bloglines” / > – this simply stopped the page from loading.
That ought to work. Have you enabled sharing on your bloglines page? (It should return an error message if it can’t reach the feed url.)
When you say that it stops the page from loading, do you mean that the site actually stops at that point — like, does txp completely stop doing its thing? Or, does the plugin just not produce anything?
Finally, because I forget to do it every single time, is the plugin activated?
-Alan
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
I did activate the plugin, and I did allow sharing in Bloglines. I just went back to check with both.
What I mean when I say that the page doesn’t load, is that the page now contains the doctyle, html, head, title, and body tags. All are empty. If I remove the plugin code from the page, everything works as it should.
I tried putting the plugin in the page without a URL, just to see what it would do, and I received a “feed not found” error, exactly as I would expect.
I’m stumped.
Just to double-check that I’m using the proper URL: in bloglines, I click the “share” button and then click “generate html” and then use the second piece of code.
Any ideas?
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Hi Jennifer-
I’m stumped. The plugin is a kludge, to be sure, but I don’t think it should prevent your whole page from loading. We’ll have to call on those more knowledgeable than we to figure this one out, I think.
Why don’t you send me the bloglines URL you’re using — either via the forum or via email. I’ll take a look at what the plugin is trying to retrieve and see if I can puzzle it out from there.
-Alan
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Has anyone checked out ats_bloglines with RC3? I’m getting a warning at the top of my webpage (which really screws things up), to whit:
<code>Warning: file(“http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html”) – Success in /home/httpd/html/blog/textpattern/publish.php(627) : eval()’d code on line 18
Warning: Bad arguments to implode() in /home/httpd/html/blog/textpattern/publish.php(627) : eval()’d code on line 18
</code>
Last edited by ruminator (2005-02-28 04:40:02)
Search is your friend… Think before writing…
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Hi ruminator-
From the warning message, it looks like maybe you don’t have the full feed URL specified. It should look more like
<pre>http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=YOUR_ID&folder=FOLDER_NAME</pre>
Where YOUR_ID is your bloglines user name, and the &folder=FOLDER argument is optional. Without the ID, I think it won’t properly retrieve a feed, and it won’t be able to implode the array.
-Alan
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Thanks for the quick response!
Here’s my call:
<code>
<txp:ats_bloglines
feedurl=“http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=ruminator&folder=must%20read” />
</code>
It looks like I’ve got both specified. Any ideas?
Search is your friend… Think before writing…
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
I should point out that this is an excellent plug-in. My wife really loves it because she can read some of my favorite regular reads!
Search is your friend… Think before writing…
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Hrrm, so much for my quick solution. It worked fine for you before RC3? It does look like you’ve got everything right. I can manually load your feed url, and a quick test shows that I can parse it. I haven’t yet tried out RC3, but it looks like there’s something there that’s causing the trouble — no idea what that may be. Have you had any server changes or anything to accompany the switch to RC3?
I’m glad you like the plugin! It looks like it’s time to revisit it for RC3. It’s nice to know that it has seen some use.
I’ll keep poking at it. In the meantime, maybe someone else has a thought on this?
-Alan
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Re: ats_bloglines: Fetch and display formatted Bloglines blogroll
Correct. The problem cropped up with RC3. Any pointers will be appreciated.
In the meantime, I moved my blogroll over to my links page where the formatting is not so important. So, there’s no pressure from me to make changes; it’s something that would be nice, though.
Thanks again…
Search is your friend… Think before writing…
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