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Neotrope
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Aug 26, 2004, 11:08 AM
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Thanks for the feedback.
I'll give you $25 via paypal for a step by step walkthrough for stupid people.
Although I'm a long time perl-hacker (I own both a top Dell PowerEdge dual Xeon with UltraSCSI RAID, etc. and the last of two CobaltRaQ4s, one died after four years), and built my first ecom site in March 1995 ... my fragile little mind is overloaded right now. As much fun as it is to sort through multiple posts for the RSS, the template (easy enough), and resetting the timezone to include the proper EST, etc. -- ugh. I'm so burnt right now with various things, coffee is not helping.
What would be "super cool" is for some kind soul to put together a definitive tutorial for dummies which could be added to the Interactive Tools documentation for the current (non-MySQL version of AM).
I'm anxious for the new version of AM with RSS and MySQL support, and will buy three copies the day it's available (seriously), but for the existing site we're running on, I need to get the RSS thing done by the 1st of the month (Sept. 2004) if possible.
So, I'm prepared to suffer through this on Saturday, but if anybody can put together a step-by-step of the whole prociess in one document, I would be eternally grateful, as I'm sure others would be as well. Of course, if I end up doing this thing on my own, I will document it for everyone, just to put my money where my mouth is :)
Thanks everybody for the help on this!
Christopher
NeotropeŽ is a U.S. Reg. Trademark and service mark.
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Neotrope
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Aug 26, 2004, 1:33 PM
Post #29 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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OKay... thanks so oooooooo much for this. BIG BIG BIG help.
Now the jackpot question... would this be simply for the 15 newest articles in the whole system, or ... how would we setup an RSS feed by category (say three main categories, with up to eight subcats) ?
Ideally somebody should be able to view "catxx" versus "catzz" news if they want to subscribe in their newsreader?
Not sure if this type of setup is doable in your directions ... (before I start the process.. never hurts to ask)...
THANKS SO MUCH .. it's very rare for me to ask for help, and being a control freak, it's really really cool that folks have taken their time to contribute to this question. I'm sure the responses will help me but also help those doing searches on this topic (most of the prior confab on this was from 2003 and dated).
Chris
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Mike4172
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Aug 26, 2004, 2:11 PM
Post #30 of 80
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Re: [Neotrope] The importance of RSS
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Sure, youc an set up as many rss feeds as you want ( by category if you want) in cronjob just add the &cat=1 (or whatever the cat number is u want to add) You can have limitless cats far as I know in RSS :) YOu could have the options of ALL categories, and then have the option of say cat 1 2 3 4 ect if you wanted. You can make accessible all the articles u want to:
&cat=4,7,9&perpage=40&template=index/rss.xml
Categories displaying cat 4 7 9, then feeding 40 articles at a time to rss. That's what you'll wanna put in your PublishCron INI file.
Regards,
Michael
NEW!Logo and Website Design
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http://www.amscripts.net
SKYPE - michael.amscripts
(This post was edited by Mike4172 on Aug 26, 2004, 2:18 PM)
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cellophane
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Aug 26, 2004, 2:53 PM
Post #31 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Mike,
Thanks for sharing. I'll test it.
Cellophane
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cellophane
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Aug 27, 2004, 5:35 PM
Post #33 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Hi Mike,
I'll try next week. I have to read about publishcron. I never used it.
Cellophane
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Neotrope
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Sep 18, 2004, 12:02 PM
Post #34 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Hokay... after having to deal with some legal matters (I'm being deposed in the case of one major search engine vs. another since I helped do some work for the "Defendent" in the case back in 1999 ... sheesh, what a legal system).
Anyway... working on this today, but a little confused by the "templates" since I need an industrial strength setup for feeds to MSN "right now" and the original template and your "quick and easy" template don't quite jibe, since the original one seems to have coding to auto-grab category name, includes langiuage, updated, image icon (I thought this was required for many RSS specs?), and what about things like the copyright tag suggested by others.
OH Interactive Tools folks, please hurry on an update for this feature! I really need this implemented for a main news feed (all news), and one for each news category (say 10 different). So, Mike thanks for your help...
It would be great if some "experienced" soul here (Mike, etc.) could post a "full template" which has all the legal, image, timestamp, etc. in there. We need to push to some big news syndicators, which is more important than simply providing text for the casual visitor/subscriber.
Thanks for any additional input or help for the temporarily mentally challenged. In this case I can't RTFM because there is no tutorial from the kind folks at Interactive Tools on utilizing RSS step-by-step "for dummies."
But, hey... I'm going to give it a try and see what happens by combining the original one from the forum with your new "simple" version... (yes, I could go look up all the RSS parameters.... etc.) :0
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Mike4172
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Sep 19, 2004, 11:00 AM
Post #35 of 80
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Re: [Neotrope] The importance of RSS
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which has all the legal, image, timestamp, etc. in there. We need to push to some big news syndicators, which is more important than simply providing text for the casual visitor/subscriber.
Only part I'm kinda puzzled by is the "legal" part you said.
The first one I posted is for the casual user who doesn't need an industrial sized RSS feed. However running a news site myself (ok ok, so I"m just the programmer, but hey isn't that good enough?) I made a workaround for the only real obsticle (which ended up being the "timestamp" part.) However before you engage into some of these workarounds you need a very good knowledge of AM. Having said that I'll engage into a tad bit more complex RSS tutorial.
I'll post here shortly.
Regards,
Michael
NEW!Logo and Website Design
Auto Post Date and Expiration
GoForum 2.02
http://www.amscripts.net
SKYPE - michael.amscripts
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Neotrope
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Sep 19, 2004, 12:09 PM
Post #36 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Sorry. I'm really burnt out since at the same time I'm running between "studio A" here on this stuff, and "Studio B" where I'm having to upgrade a PC running Gigastudio 2, to the new GigaStudio3 "orchestra edition" and also adding a memory stick to the MPC4000 (wouldn't you know the "manual" is wrong on how to open up the MPC... six screws on either side, not five ...d'oh!).
Anyway....
I basically need to setup AM to run the publish cron every hour from, say 6am ET to 12pm ET (not overnight), and "print" static RSS/XML documents which can be "subscribed" to via RSS, or "grabbed" for the XML from a news provider like Moreover (they are "scraping" me now, but have indicated it must be XML or nothing pretty quick).
For this site I only need to push the normal headline, summary, date (presumably in GMT or EDT?) and time, source (ie., our site), url to article, etc. -- the normal stuff Moreover needs.
By "legal" I meant the channel info like copyright notice, website, website main url, image icon, etc. -- the "legal" notices, but also the "legal" needs of the RSS format for compatibility with the most folks. (ie., we're not shooting for NTIF, just the RSS/XML that is the psuedo-"standard" right now)
My main questions are on a main template which can be used to publish each category to RSS automatically, presumably using publishcron, and then what settings to put in publish cron to get that to run correctly.
I am pretty familiar with hacking the templates, styles, SSI (I used .shtml not .php btw, Linux/RH ES3, Plesk) for AM, but not so much headspace with the rows/cells part of the dynamic pieces/crumbs.
Certainly, I don't expect anybody to write an opus here ... but seriously: if somebody wrote me a step-by-step MS Word doc "for dummies" on how to do this, I would seriously kick them $100 via paypal. I simply don't have the time to invest in every aspect of this issue, since it's for one site. Our main site, I'm holding off until we can get the MySQL version of AM with dbase and RSS integrated (hopefully). However, for the current site, it's freakin' me out, man!
Thanks again for all the kind charitable folks 'round here.
Christopher
NeotropeŽ
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Neotrope
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Sep 27, 2004, 1:37 PM
Post #39 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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OKay!
Back on this finally - so much for Sept. 1, now we're shooting for Oct. 1
I used your new template, setup the rss.xml (with unix line breaks) in my /templates/index/ folder, setup a category in AM called RSS, with the index set to use the rss.xml file and the publish dir. setup to be a folder in the public root (/httpdocs/ under RH ES3) called /RDF/ ... I also set the category to "hide published articles," and "don't allow users to add articles..." (a given, although not mentioned) however when I hit the setup button for this category in AM, I got this error message from AM:
Program Message
Unable to publish! Template 'index/rss.xml' does not contain a 'row_summary' cell. This template was referenced by the 'RSS' category (category record #34). Please refer to the online help for more information on TemplateCells.
SOOOOOOOOOO....... since the field isn't in your last template (very kind to provide, thank you), and since AM did create the category anyway, then presumably it will still work even with the field it thinks is missing, but not needed for our little exercise. I will assume it's not needed.
I left the "articles per page..." at default and category filename as default, since presumably they won't publish to "real" shtml pages anyway.
I'm installing the publishcron right now, and then will see if I get stuck. Luckily I don't have to go into vi to setup a cron job since Plesk7 has a control panel for that (hate to say I miss Pico on this machine....).
Plug: Penguinet is a great program for SSH into a unix box, by the way, for WindowsPC users. Cute little desk icon, even for you bowtie animal fans. :)
Okay... I shall not be defeated today by technology .....!
----------------updated
d'oh....... brain dead at the wheel. Heh... I only used the snippet from your last post (mike) and not the "entire" RSS template ... which of course won't work .... human error, as usual (mine)...
fixing template and will "re-enable" the RSS category "clean," and delete the current one to make sure it's solid.
D'oh.
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
(This post was edited by Neotrope on Sep 27, 2004, 1:43 PM)
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Mike4172
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Sep 27, 2004, 1:50 PM
Post #40 of 80
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Re: [Neotrope] The importance of RSS
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Ok sounds like your on the right rack. I was getting ready to add the fact the last template was just snippet when you updated the post.
Publishcron is a workaround instead of doing a typical cron job on your server and using up valuable bandwidth. Publishcron only publishes when a new article is created or an old article is updated. Very handy especially in this actual application of RSS.
Regards,
Michael
NEW!Logo and Website Design
Auto Post Date and Expiration
GoForum 2.02
http://www.amscripts.net
SKYPE - michael.amscripts
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Neotrope
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Sep 27, 2004, 2:36 PM
Post #41 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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I don't suppose you have an example of an RSS style publishcron.ini setting, for say...
all news, and category 2 ?
searchurl = obvious
page1 = news.rss ???
or
page1 = /root/to/public/RDS/news.rss
query1 = tamplate=index/rss.xml&perpage=10
Am I close on this ?
TIA!!!
Chris
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Neotrope
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Sep 27, 2004, 2:54 PM
Post #43 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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ah soooooooo!
Thanks, Mike! I truly appreciate all your help...
one more step foward .. tra la tra la....
next we see if it works ...
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Neotrope
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Sep 27, 2004, 3:10 PM
Post #45 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Thanks, Mike-
You antipated my next question, although i was going to search the archives before asking about that ...
I actually had intended to go that path, and am about to test the publishcron manually to see if it works ...
THEN go look at the hack on the admin panel... since it makes WAY more sense to just "publish" new XML files when there is actually something new. So... I was already on the right wavelength here, and had realized that setting up a cron job was the "second best" way to go, since it could be integrated into the AM panel.
You the man... or person ... or freethinking wobbly thing .. or?
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Neotrope
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Sep 27, 2004, 3:30 PM
Post #46 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Hmmm....
here's a weird error ..
1) I had to change publishcron.cgi to publishcron.pl just because of the way the whole redhat es/plesk environment likes to run things outside the cgi-bin, even with the httpd.conf file edited on the server.
2) when I manually run the publishcron.pl through the browser as simply, mysite.zxy/dir/dir/publishcron.pl I get the following error message (full paths truncated for security reasons in this message...)
Error: Cannot open /-PATHS-/httpdocs/RDF/news.xml for writing. at /-PATHS/publishcron.pl line 76.
Oddly, it looks like the news.xml and news2.xml files printed into the RDF folder, but it wrote a 403 forbidden text file into the document, "you do not have permission to access this document..."
Hmm. Does this indicate I need to edit my httpd.conf file to allow an xml file type along with shtml and the like? Argh.
Obviously if I can't run the script manually, putting the hack into the admin system isn't going to be much help except to generate beaucoup errors.
Suggestions?
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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Neotrope
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Sep 27, 2004, 4:07 PM
Post #48 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Hi -
Unfortunately, Apache2, RedHat ES3 and Plesk7 all work under the premise that nothing gets set higher than 755. This works on 50 sites just fine with a wide variety of scripts, ecom, forums (and AM), etc. without issue.
Generally setting things to 755 that would normally run at 777 work just fine server-wide with either cgi or pl extensions.
Of course, that's the first thing I tried, was checking permissions and making sure saved with unix line breaks vs. PC/DOS, etc.
The script gives me a server error as file.cgi, and the "cannot open" error as a .pl script, at the same permissions level.
RDF - 755
exec folder = 755
publishcron.pl = 755
ini file and readme at 755
/templates/index/rss.xml set at 755
so... in this server setup under Apache2, this should work (in the same way the AM admin.pl file works in the same folder, incidentally...).
Ahem, of course the admin panel works as admin.cgi ... so.... usually the reason we get an internal server error for cgi is badly written perl (sigh).
So, theoretically if the AM program can execute in a folder and read/write to directories and the publishcron.pl cannot, this indicates a problem more often on this server with the script itself.
Or am I missing something else?
=====================ini file=================
#--------Search URL
searchurl = http://www.website/path/
#--------Search Queries
page1 = /home/httpd/vhosts/sitename/httpdocs/RDF/news.xml
query1 = &template=index/rss.xml&perpage=10
page2 = /home/httpd/vhosts/sitename/httpdocs/RDF/news2.xml
query2 = &cat=2&template=index/rss.xml&perpage=10
#page3 =
#query3 =
=========================================
RSS template====================
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>sitename</title>
<link >http://www.domainxyz.com</link>
<description >my big company(tm)</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<ttl>5</ttl>
<copyright>(C) 2004 my big co</copyright>
<managingEditor>support@pmysitexx.com</managingEditor>
<webMaster>support@pmysitexx.com</webMaster>
<image>
<title>MYDOMAINXYZ.com</title>
<width>144</width>
<height>31</height>
<link>http://www.site.com/</link>
<url>http://www.site.com/images/rsslogo.gif</url>
</image>
<!-- template insert : $article_list$ -->
<!-- templatecell : row -->
<item>
<title >$art_name$</title>
<link >$detail_link$</link>
<pubDate>$art_time$:00 EST</pubDate>
<description >$art_summary$</description>
<category>$cat_name$</category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">$detail_link$</guid>
<author>$art_field1$ $art_field4$</author>
</item>
<!-- /templatecell : row -->
<!-- templatecell : row_summary -->
<item>
<title>$art_name$</title>
<link>$detail_link$</link>
<description>$art_summary$</description>
</item>
<!-- /templatecell : row_summary -->
<!-- templatecell : row_link -->
<title>$art_name$</title>
<link>$url_thispage$</link>
<description>$art_summary$</description>
<!-- /templatecell : row_link -->
<!-- templatecell : row_ufile -->
<title>$art_name$</title>
<link>$url_thispage$</link>
<description>$art_summary$</description>
<!-- /templatecell : row_ufile -->
<!-- templatecell : not_found -->
<font class="text"><b>Sorry, no articles were found.</b></font><br>
<!-- /templatecell : not_found -->
<!-- templatecell : img_caption -->
<table border=0 cellspacing=2 cellpadding=0 width=$img_width$ align=$img_align$>
<tr><td><img src="$img_url$" height="$img_height$" width="$img_width$" border=0></td></tr>
<tr><td><font class="text10">$img_caption$</font></td></tr>
</table>
<!-- /templatecell : img_caption -->
<!-- templatecell : img_nocaption -->
<table border=0 cellspacing=2 cellpadding=0 width=$img_width$ align=$img_align$>
<tr><td><img src="$img_url$" height="$img_height$" width="$img_width$" border=0></td></tr>
</table>
<!-- /templatecell : img_nocaption -->
<!-- template insert : $prev$ -->
<!-- templatecell : prev -->
<!-- /templatecell : prev -->
<!-- templatecell : no_prev -->
<!-- /templatecell : no_prev -->
<!-- template insert : $next$ -->
<!-- templatecell : next -->
<!-- /templatecell : next -->
<!-- templatecell : no_next -->
<!-- /templatecell : no_next -->
<!-- template insert : $more$ -->
<!-- templatecell : more -->
<!-- /templatecell : more -->
<!-- templatecell : no_more -->
<!-- /templatecell : no_more -->
</channel>
</rss>
=========================================
Now I'm stumped.
Anything look amiss in the above templates (domain name removed) -- and yes, I did have the photo/logo on the server when running the script at 744. The server was reset to have ISO characters as the default vs. UTF-8 but that shouldn't be the big beasty here, I don't think - although the error seems to come up in writing the rss.xml pages into the RDF folder. Would the "all caps" folder name impact publishcron.pl in some way? I've seen this before, although rare with some scripts that assume everything is lower case.
Now my head hurts. I do appreciate all your help.
Chris
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
(This post was edited by Neotrope on Nov 4, 2004, 5:09 PM)
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Neotrope
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Sep 28, 2004, 10:09 AM
Post #50 of 80
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Re: [Mike4172] The importance of RSS
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Turns out my search.cgi script was overloaded . . . (!)
so the search script was giving me an error trying to run it directly -- presumably since I had text links site-wide and on the 404 "under construction" page for missing content to the "advanced search" which loads the search.cgi + templates. Sheesh... I'm going to make a static page with good old submit forms, so that people "thinking" of doing a search are not running the search.cgi script hundreds of times, and all the search bots aren't kicking its butt.
This means the errors I was getting were from the publishcron not being able to run the search.cgi query, presumably.
I killed all processes and rebooted last night just for kicks ...
I may do a hack and setup searchrss.cgi and mod the search cloned file for any instances of looking for itself, as well as the publishcron cgi.
Always something ... have to work on something else a bit, then back to it!
I think everything was setup to work properly, but died when it hit the search.cgi script.
Sheesh. Talk about a workaround for this whole process.
NeotropeŽ is a brand identity and marketing communications solution provider founded 1983. Neotrope is a reg. trademark and service mark.
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