Blogs without Class or ID Item Info

Feed Creator
1

I have been trying to create an RSS feed for the Marques blog for a couple hours, and am at the point where I’m about to throw in the towel.

What makes this blog so frustrating is that it does not - at least to a newbie - contain any clear item classes or ids for its blog entries. Everything is essentially dumped into one class container with a name, and the items/blog entries are only delineated by style. See the following screenshot with notations:

Marques
Marques.jpg1822×1319 437 KB

Luckily, the bottom of each blog entry contains a “Perm-A-Link” where you can access the article at its own unique URL (i.e., instead of simply linking back to the main page/container). Without a clear class/id name to designate each blog entry, however, I can’t figure out how to create an RSS feed that contains the titles of each entry. I’ve tried numerous variations, but have not had any luck.

At the moment, I’ve reverted to a “simplistic approach” that only relies on the permalink. Below you will find the basic info for this approach, and a screenshot of its results from the Feed Creator.

Results
Results.jpg1011×568 76.6 KB

While I understand why the “simplistic approach” approach above lacks the title for each entry, I can’t figure out how to get anything else working for this blog. Does anyone have any suggestions for setting up a feed for it? In short, I’d like it to include the title and use the pemalink as its url. Nothing too complicated - or so I thought!

More generally, when items lack a class or id name, but all use the same style, is it possible to use this information to designate the item? In this blog, each is grouped under the following div: <div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #bca200; padding: 5px;">

As always, thanks for any help you can lend!!

2

In situations like this you can use the item request parameter and then narrow down the individual elements using item_title, item_url, item_desc, etc.

If no suitable class attibutes can be used, remember that you can also target elements using the element name as part of a descendant selector. For example, in this case we can say we want to target div elements appearing inside an element with class attribute ‘bigcol’:

.bigcol div

Now the item_title, item_desc, item_url selectors can be applied within the context of the selected element. So if we want the second font element, we can use:

font[2]

In this case, here’s what works for me:

Submitted parameters (
    [url] => https://www.marques.org/blogs/class99/
    [item] => .bigcol div
    [item_title] => font[2]
    [url_contains] => https://www.marques.org/blogs/class99?XID=
    [item_desc] => p
)

http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https://www.marques.org/blogs/class99/&item=.bigcol%20div&item_title=font[2]&url_contains=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marques.org%2Fblogs%2Fclass99%3FXID%3D&item_desc=p&action=Preview#results

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3

@fivefilters Thanks a ton for all of your help with this blog!! I really appreciate you digging into this one for me.

I had no idea that you could specify items by their order within an element (re: font[2]). This is incredibly helpful!

Can’t thank you enough! You guys are the best :grinning:

1 Like