Drupal 6's Feed Aggregator works well

I really love Drupal 6′s feed aggregator. It has the ability to aggregate numerous RSS (Really Simple Sybndication) news or blog feeds, categorize them, and keep them current, all in the effort to save you the trouble of going to each news source and hunting for relevant news. All you have to do is chose a category, read the summary and click the link for the article you what you want.

___What the feed aggregator will not do is filter your feeds by keyword. As well, when the RSS feeds are displayed, they can have short descriptions or full article descriptions. These full article descriptions clutter your screen, which I did not want. All I wanted was a link, a short description, and no more. When you are looking at hundreds of articles, less is indeed more.

___My solution was to use Yahoo Pipes. My current Pipes help aggregate 40 blogs (mostly from China), 40 news feeds (world wide), as well as aggregate about 100 other blog sites fed from yet another Drupal site (mostly from Asia). Yes, you can daisy chain Drupal news aggregators! With Yahoo Pipes I was able to filter by keyword, as well as go down to the RSS variable level and truncate full article descriptions. I was also able to eliminate duplicate entries and sort by article date.

___The difficulty was that my cron jobs were not completing and therefore not updating my feeds. I would get a MySQL server has gone away error, which means that my Yahoo Pipes were taking too long to complete. My Site5 host provider said that MySQL has a timeout of 15 seconds. One timeout will kill the cron job, leaving the other news feeds not updated. The Cron jobs were returning 1.2MB to 2.5MB error logs of not very helpful information. Web searches yielded very little on the MySQL error message, how to get my cron jobs to complete, and on increasing the efficiency of Yahoo Pipes.

___My original cron strategy was that I only needed to update my feeds every 3 hours, so I scheduled cron as such. What happens is that all the feeds need to be updated at once, the cron job gets overwhelmed, dies, and most of the feeds do not update.

___An alternative cron strategy proved to be the solution. I scheduled cron to run hourly, even though my feeds did not need to be updated no more than every 3 hours. A staggering pattern organically emerged. Those jobs that were easily completed were quickly done, and did not need to be updated for the next 2 cron jobs. Those jobs that took longer initially timed out. During the next cron job, because the easy feeds were already completed, there were far fewer feeds to run, so the cron jobs could concentrate on these stubborn few. In the end they were also completed.

___I used some other Yahoo Pipes strategies. I broke up one larger Yahoo Pipe into two, though I think I will try merging them together later. These larger Pipes should be run hourly, even though they may only change every 3 hours. If run hourly they will return with fewer updates but more quickly and therefore will have less of a tendency to time out.

___Take a look at my feed aggregator at DonTai.com and my Yahoo Pipes if you’re interested.

___I tried other alternate RSS solutions but they did not fulfill my requirements. Google Reader will aggregate RSS feeds but does not provide any filtering capability. Feedrinse will aggregate RSS feeds and filter, but there is no way to truncate full length RSS feeds. I could use a feed reader, but then would not be able to share my aggregated feeds with multiple people on the internet. A feed reader may be better for those who WANT the full article anyway.

Green has to be the dominant colour for Greenpeace, for what other colour could they choose?. Grenpeace stands for the environment, after all, and without green you have environmental destruction. Their logo is written in thick green, hand printed, informal and playful. The top right header has a background colour of green, and most of their links are green. Green is the dominant colour on their vessel. How can you not be drawn to their vessel, replete with their trademark rainbow and dove. This ship glides peacefully through a narrow channel with a frame of lush green trees. It is positively idylic, and if we all joined the movement, the world would be a so much better place for our kids and ourselves.Their site and their cause really brings you in. Green IS Greenpeace.

In terms of content, displayed prominently not once but twice, is “Take action”. Sign up. Donate. The message is to be proactive and do something positive now. The very important current issue is front and centre, so you cannot miss it. The bright orange, which contasts with the green, works to attract the eye and lure you in. There is the lovely photo in the centre of the page that shows you the destruction that Greenpeace fights against. Your eye is drawn to the photo, which carries you down the road lined with trees that will take centuries to grow back. The accompanying text provides explanation. As a marketing tool the website works, and works well.

In terms of web usability, there is current news displayed in one box, very prominent and easy to find. There are places to search, and to login. Overall the site is simple, clear, very understandable, but effective. Colour contrast and brightness contrast are high, allowing for easy reading. Almost all text is mixed case, which allows you to quickly scan words. The site has pleasing colours and two photos, which provides a target for your eyes.

Greenpeace UK conveys the essence of their organization, is an excellent piece of marketing, and has great usability. In my view it functions as a top notch website.

Let’s join up!

Note: This site is run by a Drupal CMS. Just check their source code.

References:
The original instructions from Drupal.org
Cutting to the important parts. Thanks Wesley Tanaka, this post was very helpful.

Files:
Unchanged files: block.tpl.php, box.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, and all the rest of the theme
Changed files: comment.tpl.php, page.tpl.php
Added files: foliage.info

Steps:
Step 1: Create foliage.info, add the following 4 lines “as is”. Note that you must use “6.x”. It won’t work if you put “6.9″.

; $Id: Foliage-850.info, 2009/01/28 goba Exp $name = Foliage 850px
description = Foliage 850px wide.
core = 6.x
engine = phptemplate

Step 2: Change comment.tpl.php
Change line 7 from: <div class=”content”><?php print $content; ?></div>
to:
  <div class=”content”>
       <?php print $content ?>
       <?php if ($signature): ?>
           <div class=”user-signature clear-block”>
             <?php print $signature ?>
          </div>
       <?php endif; ?>
  </div>
(Sorry the tabbing isn’t rendering well. The code is here.)

Step 3: Change page.tpl.php

Line 38: “$sidebar_left” to “$left”
Line 53: “$sidebar_right” to “$right”
Line 62: “$footer_message” to “$footer”
Line 2: “$language” to “$language->language”, do this twice

FTP the foliage theme file to your Drupal site’s theme folder, and select it. You’re done.

Also posted to the Drupal Foliage forum.

Interestingly, using Fantastico it was very easy to create a Drupal web site in my root directory. Fine. Unknown to me is the fact that the Drupal site is configured to http://dontai.com, which still points to my original site on Doteasy. I therefore cannot get to the new Drupal site using my domain name.

text-based Drupal admin logon screen

So what to do? I get on the Site5 forum to find out how I can use my IP address to get to my site. No luck. I talk to Joslyn on LiveHelp at Site5 and she says http://ipaddress/~loginid. Ok, this gets me to a text based Drupal login screen. I try to login with my Drupal admin ID and password and I get a 404 file not found error.

original error 404 file not found screen when I tried to login

That’s not so great. I step through with Jocelyn, who says I should go back to Drupal and ask around on the forums, or put a trouble ticket into Site5 and a senior tech will look at it. So I open a trouble ticket as she suggested, and bid her a “Good Night”.

Hmmm. Today I get an email response from Site5 saying that I need to change my domain registrar first, or Drupal will not work. I get on the forums and search. Of course others have had this same problem.

Graphics based Drupal admin logon screen

A possible solution, they say, is to go into your sites/default/settings.php and change your $base_url to the URL you want. I found mine was set to http://dontai.com. Fine, this makes sense. I copy this code line, comment out the original and change $base_url to http://ipaddress/~myID. Happily, I now get the graphics based Drupal admin screen. Unfortunately when I log on with my admin id and password I still get an error 404 file not found message.

second error 404 file not found message

I think I’ll start the process of moving my domain registrar. While this is happening, kill the Drupal install and FTP my original site to Site5 and get it working. Once I know the DNS is functioning well, then I’ll remove my index.htm file and reinstall Drupal, and hope that this will work.

I’ll still need to keep hunting on the web for answers.