forked from friendica/friendica-addons
164 lines
6 KiB
Smarty
164 lines
6 KiB
Smarty
<h2>Retriever Plugin Help</h2>
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<p>
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This plugin replaces the short excerpts you normally get in RSS feeds
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with the full content of the article from the source website. You
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specify which part of the page you're interested in with a set of
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rules. When each item arrives, the plugin downloads the full page
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from the website, extracts content using the rules, and replaces the
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original article.
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</p>
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<p>
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There's a few reasons you may want to do this. The source website
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might be slow or overloaded. The source website might be
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untrustworthy, in which case using Friendica to scrub the HTML is a
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good idea. You might be on a LAN that blacklists certain websites.
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It also works neatly with the mailstream plugin, allowing you to read
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a news stream comfortably without needing continuous Internet
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connectivity.
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</p>
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<p>
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However, setting up retriever can be quite tricky since it depends on
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the internal design of the website. That was designed to make life
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easy for the website's developers, not for you. You'll need to have
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some familiarity with HTML, and be willing to adapt when the website
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suddenly changes everything without notice.
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</p>
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<h3>Configuring Retriever for a feed</h3>
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<p>
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To set up retriever for an RSS feed, go to the "Contacts" page and
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find your feed. Then click on the drop-down menu on the contact.
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Select "Retriever" to get to the retriever configuration.
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</p>
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<p>
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The "Include" configuration section specifies parts of the page to
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include in the article. Each row has three components:
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</p>
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<ul>
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<li>An HTML tag (e.g. "div", "span", "p")</li>
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<li>An attribute (usually "class" or "id")</li>
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<li>A value for the attribute</li>
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</ul>
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<p>
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A simple case is when the article is wrapped in a "div" element:
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</p>
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<pre>
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...
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<div class="ArticleWrapper">
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<h2>Man Bites Dog</h2>
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<img src="mbd.jpg">
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<p>
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Residents of the sleepy community of Nowheresville were
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shocked yesterday by the sight of creepy local weirdo Jim
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McOddman assaulting innocent local dog Snufflekins with his
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false teeth.
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</p>
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...
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</div>
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...
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</pre>
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<p>
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You then specify the tag "div", attribute "class", and value
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"ArticleWrapper". Everything else in the page, such as navigation
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panels and menus and footers and so on, will be discarded. If there
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is more than one section of the page you want to include, specify each
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one on a separate row. If the matching section contains some sections
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you want to remove, specify those in the "Exclude" section in the same
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way.
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</p>
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<p>
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Once you've got a configuration that you think will work, you can try
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it out on some existing articles. Type a number into the
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"Retrospectively Apply" box and click "Submit". After a while
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(exactly how long depends on your system's cron configuration) the new
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articles should be available.
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</p>
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<h3>Techniques</h3>
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<p>
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You can leave the attribute and value blank to include all the
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corresponding elements with the specified tag name. You can also use
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a tag name of just an asterisk ("*"), which will match any element type with the
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specified attribute regardless of the tag.
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</p>
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<p>
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Note that the "class" attribute is a special case. Many web page
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templates will put multiple different classes in the same element,
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separated by spaces. If you specify an attribute of "class" it will
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match an element if any of its classes matches the specified value.
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For example:
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</p>
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<pre>
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<div class="article breaking-news">
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</pre>
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<p>
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In this case you can specify a value of "article", or "breaking-news".
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You can also specify "article breaking-news", but that won't match if
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the website suddenly changes to "breaking-news article", so that's not
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recommended.
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</p>
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<p>
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One useful trick you can try is using the website's "print" pages.
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Many news sites have print versions of all their articles. These are
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usually drastically simplified compared to the live website page.
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Sometimes this is a good way to get the whole article when it's
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normally split across multiple pages.
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</p>
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<p>
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Hopefully the URL for the print page is a predictable variant of the
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normal article URL. For example, an article URL like:
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</p>
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<pre>
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http://www.newssite.com/article-8636.html
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</pre>
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<p>
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...might have a print version at:
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</p>
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<pre>
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http://www.newssite.com/print/article-8636.html
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</pre>
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<p>
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To change the URL used to retrieve the page, use the "URL Pattern" and
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"URL Replace" fields. The pattern is a regular expression matching
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part of the URL to replace. In this case, you might use a pattern of
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"/article" and a replace string of "/print/article". A common pattern
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is simply a dollar sign ("$"), used to add the replace string to the end of the URL.
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</p>
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<h3>Background Processing</h3>
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<p>
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Note that retrieving and processing the articles can take some time,
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so it's done in the background. Incoming articles will be marked as
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invisible while they're in the process of being downloaded. If a URL
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fails, the plugin will keep trying at progressively longer intervals
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for up to a month, in case the website is temporarily overloaded or
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the network is down.
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</p>
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{{if $allow_images}}
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<h3>Retrieving Images</h3>
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<p>
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Retriever can also optionally download images and store them in the
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local Friendica instance. Just check the "Download Images" box. You
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can also download images in every item from your network, whether it's
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an RSS feed or not. Go to the "Settings" page and
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click <a href="$config">"Plugin settings"</a>. Then check the "All
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Photos" box in the "Retriever Settings" section and click "Submit".
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</p>
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{{/if}}
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<h2>Configure Feeds:</h2>
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<div>
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{{foreach $feeds as $feed}}
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<div class="contact-entry-wrapper" id="contact-entry-wrapper-{{$feed.id}}">
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<a href="{{$feed.url}} title="{{$feed.img_hover}}">
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<div class="contact-entry-photo-wrapper">
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<div class="contact-entry-photo mframe" id="contact-entry-photo-{{$feed.id}}">
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<img src="{{$feed.thumb}}" {{$feed.sparkle}} alt="{{$feed.name}}"/>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div class="contact-entry-desc">
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<div class="contact-entry-name" id="contact-entry-name-{{$feed.id}}">
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{{$feed.name}}
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</div>
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</div>
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</a>
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</div>
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{{/foreach}}
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</div>
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