nukeFEED vs nukePIE

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:09 pm

Greetings good people. I have spent the better part of the day investigating the new release. Man it looks cool. May I check to see if I got this right.

NukeFeed is a module that creates specific news feeds by design for some end user(s) By addressing these feeds other websites and news readers may harvest this information for display. This information is determined by the way I set it up locally and may include downloads forums topics or whatever I designate.

NukePIE on the other hand is a block that functions as the harvester. I set up or select the news feed in the ADMIN blocks set up. I then create a new block referencing the desired news feed and determine where I want it displayed and voila fresh news displayed in my website.

The question that the answer seems obvious to and which I will ask anyway: Are both of these methods independently indexible to the web?

registered · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6437

You got it just right. nukeFEED generates feeds, nukePIE consumes (reads) feeds.

Technically, the answer to your question is yes - nukeFEED HTML feed previews and associated feeds, as well as the incoming feeds are accessible to search engines. Because the feeds aren't separate pages, they will be indexed on the pages on which they appear.

One word of caution - even though nukePIE uses the super-fast SimplePie class and caches feeds, having too many inbound feeds on your site can cause problems with search engines. First, it can add a number of outbound links, which could make your site appear like a directory. Next, some consider duplicating the content of other web sites to be harmful for SEO.

I look at inbound feeds as a way to provide related content that might interest my visitors. Future versions may provide features like the ability to combine items from multiple feeds into one block.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy nukeFEED and nukePIE. PHP-Nuke has been screaming for this kind of functionality for some time, so now it's time to update nukeSEO, then...

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:42 pm

jlajax, you sure caught on to this a lot faster than I did Smile

. I had the privilege of working with Kguske in testing the feeds and especially the pie version prior to release. Kguske has fixed problems here with the headlines function that plagued various Nuke versions for years. And as he says, there is a lot more to come. I have a simple hack for instance that lets you set a site wide limit for the number of feed items in an incoming feed. What we need to do is turn that from a "hack" into a permanent and reliable solution but that involves significant changes to blocks.php and the blocks table that we just didn't have time for for rn2.20.

Here's an idea for you. I support a bicycle club site. So once I saw the capabilities of simplepie what I did was go googling around "bicycle" and "rss" until I found a bunch of bike related rss feeds. I then tested each by bringing it up in Firefox and I assessed how useful they would be to my users. Those that passed the test I put in as blocks on my home page. You can see the results at webmhcc.org

Also, it's a little known fact I think but there is actually a table, nuke_headlines that contains pre-certified feeds for Ravennuke. During our testing we found that many of the feeds that were left over from PHPnuke heritage in the headlines table didn't work (what a surprise!) so Kguske set us up with a new headlines table with working feeds. From blocks administration you can go in an actually maintain this table and add your own feeds there so they are easier to get at in the future.

I hope that's helpful. And as I say the whole community owes a big hand of applause to kguske for moving us forward in this way ... and maybe a few contributions to his nukeseo site in addition.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 8:11 pm

kguske wrote:

One word of caution - even though nukePIE uses the super-fast SimplePie class and caches feeds, having too many inbound feeds on your site can cause problems with search engines. First, it can add a number of outbound links, which could make your site appear like a directory. Next, some consider duplicating the content of other web sites to be harmful for SEO..

Tough to determine where helpful outside links end and harmful reciprocal links begin.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:29 pm

It can be, but generally you will know if the content is worthwhile for your site's visitors. One other thing to consider - adding links, content, JS, images, from offsite places can really impact your load time. Not so much with a cached feed, but if you're the lucky who updates the cache on a slow loading feed...

registered · Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:51 pm

So I'm trying to figure out nukeFeed. Does it/can it replace backend.php and backendforums.php? Do I have to sign up with a service to use it? I was confused about that part in the config.

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 6:59 pm

Oh....I see that backend.php does pass through to nukeFeed now! Oh wow this is really nice!!!! Great job! And the forum posts are in order now. Cool!

Still don't get the feedburner thing if you could explain, thanks.

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 6:59 pm

So one thing on my to-do list is to add RSS to GCalendar. Should I add code to GCalendar or add the code to nukeFeed?

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:35 pm

Actually Gremmie, if your Gcalendar could read RSS feeds and add dated items to the calendar that would be great. I've thought about two options:

1. dynamically, read subscribed RSS feeds that have dates and display them (perhaps as RSS-xxx categories) on Gcalendar
2. "statically" ... read a RSS feed and add an item to the Gcalendar internal tables for each dated item it finds.

Stepping back from that, I have a bicycle ride calendar and I generate RSS feeds from it and I have Gcalendar too but I haven't linked the two. I could emulate your code and add my items to your calendar at the same time I add them to mine, or there could be some kind of RSS link. The problem with the "static" type of link is that say you are on March 1 and someone adds an event on April 15 and RSS propagates it thru to Gcalendar. Then they go into my calendar and delete it or change it; how do you make sure that gets carried thru.

And back to the thread: I think the Feedburner thing is completely optional and just gives your feed a little more publicity. But yeah what Kguske did for RN is "really nice".

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 10:27 pm

Wow I was thinking something different. GCalendar would push out events to RSS that people could subscribe to.

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 1:15 am

An RSS feed out of GCalender would be cool, maybe on a per category basis. Very Happy

Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 11:59 am

Just to revive this year and a half old thread briefly. It doesn't look to me that there is any way to create a subscribe-able feed from Gcalendar (without writing the code) right now. Is that right? Or it there some magic in nukefeeds that will do it for us? Does anyone have a feed to gcalendar working?

Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 12:12 pm

It's possible, but not simple. The problem is repeating events, which would require logic similar to the calendar page in a class that could be used with nukeFEED.

Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 1:40 pm

Thank you Kevin. Yes, sigh. I hacked backend.php to create a feed for my ride calendar on my bike club site. But when you mention it, I don't have repeating events stored in the database. What I mean is that I allow the user to create repeating events but then I store them each in the calendar on the day of the event ... so once created they become like single events and I can just read the calendar and put them out into the feed. Of course, once created this way they can't any longer be edited (or deleted) as repeating events.

Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 2:29 pm

I've seen a calendar that stores them as separate events, but allows maintenance on the repeating events that occur in the future. Really nice. It was my intent to nuke it before gCalendar came along, but I didn't have time (or urgent need, really).

Anyway, if you don't have repeating events in the calendar, I suppose it would be much easier to add to nukeFEED, as well as to the nukeSEO sitemap.