Hey Joe, I've been working with feed manager. As a City government, one of our responsibilities is communicating emergency information to our citizens. The State of California maintains feeds of their EDIS emergency alert system. They have an RSS feed for current alerts (last 24 hours or so), an Atom feed of the same alerts, and an Atom feed of the archived alerts for the last 7 days.

In working with these feeds, I've run into two issues:

1. Obviously, the feeds cover the entire state of California, so we need to separate the wheat from the chaff and only show the alerts that affect our citizens. So selective publishing is a must, but with the frequency of these alerts (dozens of them per day, at all hours) as well as time sensitivity, manual publishing just won't fly. Would it be possible to enhance Feed Manager so we can automatically publish or exclude from publishing posts based on keywords and/or regular expressions? The EDIS posts include the areas affected for the alert, so this would be an ideal solution.
2. The Atom feeds don't seem to be recognized by Feed Manager. Looking at the source of the feed pages, there's a comment that reads "This comment is here to foil IE and firefox attempt to treat this as a channel and thereby ignore our stylesheet." I don't know if that comment is hosing up mojoPortal's processing too, or if there is some other issue with them.

Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Jamie

Hi Jaime,

The issue is that these feeds provide no publication date for feed items. To use feeds with no item dates you have to change the setting "Show posts up to this many days old" to 0, otherwise the feed items are filtered out.

Most normal blog feeds have publication dates on the items in the feed and typically old ones drift off the list over time and new ones come in.

I've managed to use the feed http://www.us-cert.gov/channels/techalerts.rdf on http://demo.mojoportal.com/feeds.aspx by changing the setting as indicated.

Best,

Joe

Great Joe, thank you!

Hi Jamie,

I just applied a patch to trunk with the fix for those feeds. The problem was that on Atom feeds we were skipping over items if there was no content body. These feeds have no content body, they have only links and titles.

There are various services online that can filter feeds, a few of them are linked on this page:

http://www.mojoportal.com/using-the-feed-manager.aspx

Best,

Joe

Just in case anyone has need of some advanced feed filtering, I can highly recommend the very powerful and flexible Yahoo! Pipes service. For our emergency alerts feed, I was able to combine two Atom feeds, filter to include based on four keywords, exclude based on one keyword, and adjust the published time to make it UTC instead of PST so it would be displayed correctly on our site.

Ultimately, I'd still prefer to be able to set up filters within the module itself, to remove an extra third-party complication/point of failure, but this will certainly be sufficient for now.