I cannot get the Feed Creator working properly on either of my servers. I run up-to-date WordPress blog installs on both of these servers, with no problems - if that tells you anything about their PHP status.
I installed Feed Creator by FTP uploading the folder, and then I had no problems loading the …/feedcreator/index.php
I then ran an extraction for Preview of the feed. But the RSS Preview content does not load, while the exact same extraction test works fine on your http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and gives me a viable feed.
Preview does give the title of the target page, but nothing more. When I then try to load the feed into an RSS reader, the feed is also empty. This same problem occurs with my installations on either server.
What am I doing wrong? Are there some additional FTP permissions that need to be set on certain of the .PHP files?
Hi Dave, sorry to hear you had trouble. If you get the title of the target page in the preview, that’s usually a sign that things are working okay. If there’s something wrong with the environment, you can sometimes get useful error message from the server if you replace the index.php with extract.php (after you click ‘Preview’, just edit the URL in the your address bar replacing index.php with extract.php). If that doesn’t help, could you email us the URL where you’ve installed it. Email us on help@fivefilters.org and we’ll take a look.
Hi Keyvan. I get no error message when I manually replace index.php with extract.php after clicking Preview. This is the case when I choose either extract option (“if link URL contains” / “inside HTML elements”).
I now find that the “Only keep links if link URL contains:” function works. For instance, I can use “http” here and will get a viable feed with Web links and titles. However this is not very useful, as it usually only allows targeting URL elements such as “http” or “www”.
I find that the “Look for links inside HTML elements whose id or class attribute contains:” does not work. For instance, when I use “h2” in this box and click Preview there are no post results in the feed. But the same “h2” will work for the same URL when I use the same script hosted at your service at http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ Does this aspect of the script perhaps require caching the target HTML page first, in order to work?
Dave Haden
Hi Dave,
If you’re trying to tell Feed Creator to look inside h2 elements, ie.
…
, then this is the wrong way of doing it. That field for id or class attributes contain should be a value that appears inside a class="…" or id="…" attribute.
It’s strange that you’re not getting the same results as you see on our site. But the only way we can find out why that might be is to actually see the URL you’re submitting to Feed Creator and also the URL where you’ve installed Feed Creator so we can compare the results ourselves.
If you can email those to us at help@fivefilters.org we should be able to help you out some more.