#51828
Greg - 2/03/2009 2:21 PM
Read this post only if you’re familiar with RSS or want more technical information about what’s going on during my external blog import process:

RSS feeds are pretty standard for the most part, but there are some differences to take into consideration. An RSS feed item list may only have a title, pubDate, link and description for each article. Some may include the content:encoded tag with raw html code. And all use that crazy date/time format that is based on GMT.

I had to create a date/time converter that takes in most RSS date formats and spits out a SQL readable date/time format in Central time (CST). I also created a process that checks to see if the "encoded" tag exists in the RSS item section, if it does, I import the contents of that tag and not the contents of the description tag.

If you’re interested in learning how I did all this, just send me a direct message and we can chat. It was only through lots of trial and error (and lots of reading online) that I figured out the best way to import RSS files, read through them, and store data into my SQL database. And to top it off, I created a vbs file that is going to run on my web server to auto import the RSS feeds every day or so.

From a programmers perspective, this feature was pretty cool to develop. I hope you all enjoy it.