jason.defay.org | you're grounded, chicken!

UPDATE: Please note that Craigslist is no longer blocking Yahoo Pipes. However you many not need to use Pipes due to improvements to the CL search engine (see comments below)

Craigslist.org is a great commercial free website for connecting local buyers/sellers.  But if you've ever tried to put create a custom Craigslist search, you might be frustrated by the inability of Craigslist to handle complex searches with multiple custom criteria (e.g. cars under $5,000 made by Honda, Toyota or Nissan).

This website is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System (CMS). In addition to the Drupal base system, I've implemented the following modules/enhancements:

Drupal Modules:

Captcha for spam control and to help make sure only humans can create new user accounts (as opposed to spamBots). reCaptcha is used in conjunction with this module to enhance security & generate a slicker looking UI

I started tinkering with a new Drupal theme that has drop down nav menus that I found here: http://thanhsiang.org/faqing/node/88#comment-522. After rearranging my menu system, I was able to get the drop downs to work correctly & I also connected the menuing system to the Drupal taxonomy module which I also recently configured.

So far I've setup two taxonomies, the first I call 'subject' with categories like: life, family, travel, running, local, gaming, politics, tech, and research. The second taxonomy I created is called 'content types' and has just two types in it, video and images.

Then I assigned one or more of these two sets of intersecting taxonomy categories to each content item on my site. The idea here is to allow a user to click on a "content type" (e.g. videos) that they might want to see & that will give them a list of all content with that content type.

I implemented the changes suggested by ahoeben in his patch that appears on the Drupal website. Then I tried changing all the check_plain references to aggregator_filter_xss, but still got funky characters in my Google News feeds. Singe quotes were being converted into their HTML encoded equivalent ' .

The patch only seems to clean titles that show up in feed blocks, but not in the Drupal aggregator category view because the funky encoding is still stored in the database. Ahoeben's patch only fixes them as they are displayed in feed blocks.

I wanted to remove them before they go into the database, so I added htmlspecialchars_decode() to the aggregator.module aggregator_parse_feed function.

It works great and whenever a " ' " shows up in the title of any of my news feeds (like in the word it's), it is replaced with a single quote and then inserted into the database for later use.

Here's the line before:

$title = $item['TITLE'];

And here it is after:

$title = htmlspecialchars_decode($item['TITLE'], ENT_QUOTES);

The Drupal feed aggregator module "aggregator.module" doesn't handle feeds with single quotes in them very well. As a result, I've had to make some minor changes to the module based on suggestions found on the Drupal website http://drupal.org/node/61456

Strangely, the patches I've made based on the Drupal disucssion thread have fixed the appearance of single quotation marks in the feed blocks, but not on the aggregator news summary page.

For example, compare the news block called "breaking news" on the right & notice the appearance of any single quotes in the headlines. If there are some, then click the 'more' link and find the same headline. Notice how the single quotes now appear garbled like this "'".

If anyone has any suggestions for fixing this, please let me know!