Feed Your Blog Plugin
Created on: Apr 28, 2008 12:06 PM by Aaron Johnson - Last Modified: Mar 30, 2009 2:20 PM by Aaron Johnson
The Feed Your Blog plugin gives you the ability to have your Clearspace instance periodically poll an RSS or Atom feed and have it post any new entries that it finds to a blog that you specify.
Use Cases
You really want to see your external (public) corporate blog inside the internal Clearspace instance used by your employees instead of by having to go to your external community.
You post interesting stuff on your personal blog and you don't want to have to repost it to another Clearspace instance.
Technologies
The plugin uses Spring and DWR: it defines a DAO, a manager class and a DWR bean using the spring.xml plugin configuration file, the manager is injected with the DAO, the action and the DWR class are injected with the manager.
The source is available in the SVN repository repo.
Installation
Like most Clearspace plugins, you can install FeedBlog through the Admin console. Open the admin console and navigate to System > Plugins, then click Add Plugin and browse for your plugin JAR file.
Usage
If you want to use it, click on 'Your Stuff' in the user bar and then click on 'Feed My Blog'. Enter in the URL for your feed, optionally choose to limit the posts that you want to show up in Clearspace using the include and exclude words and then click the 'add feed' button. After a maximum of 10 minutes (and assuming that you have entries in your feed), you should see blog posts on your blog.
Limitations
Escaped HTML in content is not currently supported. Example: you write a blog post about some cool new HTML that you've written and you include a code block that has the HTML, naturally you escape the HTML. These posts will not display properly.
Currently only supports 50 characters in the include / exclude categories input boxes, need to increase this to 500.
Aaron Johnson
says
in response to rrutan:
Ryan: sorry for not replying earlier. Yes, it is in response to that thread. Let me know how you like it if you're using it.
Cheers,
AJ
chrisholmes
says
in response to Aaron Johnson:
Just wanted to post here that we are heavily using this and have made some changes. Our users actually did not want blogs in their clearspace instance...they have Wordpress. So we thought (after talking with Aaron in Portland) that this plus the current blogs in Clearspace would actually make an excellent RSS Reader.
We hit a homerun thanks to Aaron's plugin. We are still making mods (both to the plugin) and to overlays on the blogs in CS themselves. We have introduced things like "mark as read", "tags" for filtering in the reader, categories based on the feed you aggregate, and other enhancements.
So far the users love it. They get the ease and collaboration part of the blogs (comments, track backs, etc.) and they have a historical record of feeds they are pulling from external sources.
Adam Hostetter
says:
Hi Aaron, loved the plugin for 2.0.x any eta on getting it updated for 2.5.x? Thanks again for the awesome stuff.
Todd McCullough
says
in response to Adam Hostetter:
Adam,
The 2.5.x version is now available. We've added some HTML tidying that should clean up malformed HTML. Enjoy.
Cheers,
-Todd
Ted Hopton
says
in response to Todd McCullough:
I'm running 2.5.3 and tried to use the Feed Your Blog plugin but I get the "Unexpected Error" page. Any suggestions?
Eugene Toporov
says:
Just found this plugin and VERY happy about it! We do not want to migrate our WordPress blogs right now but would like their content appear in the community.
However, when tried this in CS 2.5.4 I got the posts from the WordPress blog but with no post text. Titles, dates and tags are ok. Any ideas why this could happen? Have not had a chance to look through code yet...
Eric Butler
says:
Running 2.5.5 in a Jive sandbox. Getting "unexpected error". Stack trace:
http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/message/161907#161907
Nicola Zago
says
in response to Eric Butler:
I'm running 2.5.6. The plugin works but no content are imported, only post title and tags.
suggestion?
Eugene Toporov
says
in response to Todd McCullough:
Any chance the problems mentioned below (or above?) could be looked at? Thanks a lot!
Larry Williams
says
in response to Eugene Toporov:
Agreed - we're using this plugin and, though nifty in theory, it is disappointing that no content is imported and the links in the title/tags don't work.
Are there any updates as to when this issue will be remedied?
mkmurray
says:
I downloaded the 1.X plugin and it doesn't upload as is into Clearspace 1.10.1. Any ideas? Thanks.
Ted Hopton
says
in response to Aaron Johnson:
Hi Aaron,
Have you taken a look at the Feed Your Blog plugin lately with Jive SBS 3.0? It's not working for us and there's a thread from another customer reporting the same thing.
We'd really love to have it working again, as it adds tremendous value. Sure wish Jive would simply build it in and support it, too.
mkmurray
says
in response to Ted Hopton:
Yeah, we're on 3.0 now too and can't get the plugin to work either. Just get a generic error message.
Please help, Aaron.
Jeremy Eskritt
says:
Curious as to what is stopping this from being incorporated into the core product, or even having this plugin become one of the supported plugins...
This plugin allows streamlined content syndication from existing blogging platforms that most users are currently using anyway. While the blogging feature is good in clearspace, it does not match the capability of full blown blogging systems like Wordpress, for example.
Why should users be forced to choose one or the other, when this plugin proves you can have your cake and eat it too. 
Plus this saves much time and effort by not having to double post or having content in multiple places.
My two cents
rrutan
says
in response to Jeremy Eskritt:
I definitely like the concept of this plugin; however, one thing I'd like to see changed about this plugin before it makes it into the main stream application is the ability to control the Threading agents a bit more. Possibly as well a moderated way for System Admins to "approve" new feeds that are being requested by users. At the end of the day, our N users are creating N x X feeds that are polled at the whim of the TimerTask.
Dont get me wrong, we love this feature....even with its minor bugs here and there....but if we are collecting change for the FeedYourBlog feature...here are my 2 cents =)
Jeremy Eskritt
says
in response to rrutan:
Great points
I definitely agree that the scaling of having so many users bringing in X amount of feeds polled via java TimerTask could bottleneck if overloaded with potentially tens of thousands of feeds in a large organization, if not properly developed. Does anyone know what the limits are for this?
I just see much potential in an open enterprise guided on SOA principles, and being able to easily share content across platforms ...a pipe dream, i know . In our organization where we have standalone blogging, wiki, and forums platforms... being able to syndicate blogs alone for us in Clearspace is a huge win.
Although in regards for the 'approval' of new feeds, space admins can already bring in any RSS feed they want with as many RSS widgets that can fit on the page, which requires no approval. So i guess depending on how your community administration is structured, and if it is tightly locked down, this may or may not be an issue for you. But if you give users the ability to create sub communities and self-administer within a pre-defined structure, they still have the opportunity to bring in any feeds they wish.
Also, does this only work for personal blogs, or can it be used for community blogs too? I definitely miss the old aggregator feature..
While it may not be 100% ready for productization yet, since it may not fit the majority of use cases in all businesses, it would definitely help to get some support around this plugin and maybe consider it as a candidate for 'Officially Supported Plugin'. Thoughts?
Aaron Johnson
says
in response to rrutan:
Ryan: great points, when I originally wrote it back last year (I think) it was more of a scratch my own itch kind of thing, I totally agree the architecture (as designed) won't scale to thousands of feeds and frankly that's the thing that's standing in the way of it becoming a supported plugin.
Can you guys post the error logs you're seeing in a thread? I'd be happy to help in my spare time.
AJ
rrutan
says
in response to Aaron Johnson:
Aaron,
Most of the "errors" we are seeing are in regards to the limitations noted in your release notes of the plugin with malformed HTML and general variations in hand-written HTML. To my knowledge, I dont know of any additional problems ... more feature requests I guess =) I notice some NPEs in the logs every now and then that are anonymous...(i.e. no stack trace)...i've tracked them down to the TimerTask for FeedBlog, and appear to happen when the plugin encounters some bad content during the parse/cleanup phase. Hope this helps clarify ...if you want examples, i'll need to get with my business folk and have them collect some snippets.
Ted Hopton
says
in response to rrutan:
Aaron,
Jive support told me that this plugin was throwing many errors in our logs and they were concerned it *might* be related to performance problems we've been seeing. Please follow up with them for the specifics.
Aaron Johnson
says
in response to Ted Hopton:
Did you guys resolve the issue with the feed your blog database tables not being migrated from the 2.5 instance to the 3.0 instance?
Ted Hopton
says
in response to Aaron Johnson:
Aaron Johnson
says
in response to rrutan:
cool, yeah, I'd be happy to take a look at the errors you're seeing but you're right that the majority of the problems are going to come from malformed HTML, which is a problem more with the internal HTML parser that we use internally (ie: the plugin itself doesn't do HTML parsing).
AJ
This looks very interesting. Am definitely going to try it out, as we'd like to allow our user's to continue using their existing blogs, but have those postings consumed and injected into Clearspace Community so they can be surfaced out of our new Blogs....will let you know when I get a chance to kick the tires.....is this in response to this discussion thread per chance?