Two makes a pattern

When Movable Type 3.2 was released a little over two years ago, I wrote a plugin just for fun (and, well, to make Anil happy).

Tonight, the team has released Movable Type 4, pretty much the best MT release, ever: a beautiful new UI, great new features, powerful developer changes under the hood, a gorgeous new website, open source, &c. I'm so proud of the team that worked on this release.

And... I've written a new plugin for it. Refeed builds reblogging into Movable Type: configure a list of RSS and Atom feeds that you want to pull in to your blog, and new posts in the feeds will be spliced into your main blog automatically.

It was fun to write, because there are a ton of new features in MT4 that make it easy to set up configuration settings for plugins, make use of scheduled tasks, &c. And so, of course, Refeed requires MT4. :)

Anyway, congratulations to the team for such a fantastic release!

Comments

[Arvind Satyanarayan]

[this is good] I'd also love to know what you thought of the plugin dir!

[Michael Sippey]

Yay!

[Anil]

[this is good] Two's a trend. Two's a trend.

[btrott]

Yep, I should've mentioned that too--the plugin directory is amazing! So easy to use, and it was really easy to submit my new plugin, as well. :)

[btrott]

Ah, okay. I wondered why I couldn't find any Google results for "two makes a pattern."

[Kymberlie R. McGuire]

[this is good] Yay indeed!

[davidhornik]

[this is good] Congrats on the release and congrats on the plugin.  Thrilled to see both!

[Yann]

Now you're first on google with this search... This is how you start a ... whatever

[Boult]

Are there any site with this in action yet?   I only see one screen but not in action hmm..    Is this similar to Reblog http://www.reblog.org/ ?

[Samuel Mikel Bowles]

I'm trying to get this to work with del.icio.us to no avail. I've got my feed URI in there but I am not sure what else to do to figure out what's going wrong.

[btrott]

Refeed will log to the MT activity log if it runs into any problems... try checking there to see if there are any errors.


Alternatively, note that Refeed works as a scheduled task in MT, so you'll need to enable scheduled tasks (which involves setting up a cron job on most installations, afaik).

[Martin Kelley]

[this is good] I know I'm close. I've got the scheduled tasks working (a struggle
mostly because I'm relatively clueless with the VI editor). The
activity log shows this:

Error during task 'Check for updates to feeds (Refeed)': Can't locate Feed/Find.pm in @INC (@INC contains:

When I installed Feed::Find I got weird feedback that some tests worked
and some didn't. Should I be looking at MT or Feed::Find to figure this
out?

I'm totally jazzed by this plugin. For the last few years I've had a
multi-editor links blog with MT-generated pages that merely pull in and
display the Del.icio.us RSS using MagpieRSS. I've jumped on Yahoo Pipes
as a way of massaging the source feed but there is so much I could do if each link item were an MT post. My personal blog has been evolving into a
stream-of-consciousness blog powered by Twitter, Flickr, Gabcast--and
of course the occasional MT post! If Refeed could separate by category
a little CSS trickery would let me create a Tumblr-like stream visually
organized by source.
Thanks! Martin
<a href="http://www.quakerranter.org">quakerranter.org</a> (personal) and <a href="http://www.quakerquaker.org">quakerquaker.org</a> (links)

[Richard]

[this is good] I have refeed installed as well as the necessary perl modules but when it tries to run I get the following error:

Error during task 'Check for updates to feeds (Refeed)': Can't create
history database support/refeed-history.db: No such file or directory
at /home/rmiles/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/R efeed/refeed.pl line
61.

Any ideas on how to get it to work?

[Richard]

Anyone have an idea of how to get it to work properly? One of the guys at the Six Apart forum said he created it manually. Is it just a plain text file?

[Mark Johnson]

[this is good]

Hi Ben,

I've got a question (about altering the reFeed entry title to remove the RSS feed name) over on the MT Community Forum under Entries and Archives (jmarkj) that no one seems to want to answer or be able to answer. Is it possible to remove the RSS Feed name from the front end of the blog entry titles? Otherwise, it works great.

[btrott]

Mark, yep, you can change that, but you'll need to edit the plugin source to do it.

Find this line:

title               => join(': ', $feed->title, $entry->title),

and change it to:

title               => $entry->title,

[Mark Johnson]

Awesome. Thanks for that Ben, works just like I need now. This is part of a pretty ambitious project for a portal client that deploys not only reFeed but a lot of new MT plugins like GeoSpatial Simple for Google mapping, along with others. Planning to publish a case study for the MT community when it's complete and will let you, Anil and Byrne know when it's done. Thanks again.

[Tony]

Does this work with MT 4.23? It does not seem to. It does not even throw an error in the log