[Plugin: RSS Just Better] Items reordered

Bill, hi.

Thanks for your email. I guess feedburner orders the items by reverse date/time order. I also use feedburner in my personal website and so I get my items ordered when I use it. As your items have exactly the very same date and time (how do you do it?) I do not know how comes they are in a different order. I guess some items are quicker to be read than others therefore they come sooner in my list (programmatically, a simple array after all).

I have two workaround to propose you:
1) with the latest version of my plugin (0.8), you are able to order by title (alphabetically) you might start your titles with a date like 07.20 so that your items will be alphabetically ordered but also by date.
2) publish your items to feedburner one by one in the reverse order to what you want them to be displayed. I know it’s not handy but it should work.

Please let me know how to goes.
Stef

Stef,
Thanks for getting back to me.
I’m building the RSS feed by using Pipes to merge input from 3 Google Calendars, sorting the merged records by the date/time of the event, selecting the =next 6 events to occur and then appending the day/month values to the event title. I then pass the output into Feedburner to build the RSS records. That explains why the RSS items all have the same date/time. There may be an easier way but at least I got this one working!

Having got my RSS feed into the right format and order, what I really want is for the RSS widget not to sort them – just deliver them in the order they are in the feed. Is that possible?

By the way, I can see that your idea of changing the format to put the date at the beginning would work but I’d have to use YYMMDD format or something similar and that’s not a good way for humans to see dates – particularly in the UK where we’d normally use DDMMYY.

Your other idea of resorting the list is interesting – but not immediately obvious how I do it as the RSS date/time is assigned during the initial merge process but I’ll see if I can work out how to change these data items later on in the Pipes process.

Anyway – thanks for your help.
regards,
Bill

… I have an idea …
I’ll let you know if it works!

My RSS feed is deliveredd by date, soonest to latest, but RSS Just Better reverses the order. I too do not want the RSS widget to sort them but instead to deliver them as they are in the feed.

Have you come up with a solution?

I also do not reorder the items by date, at least not intentionally.

I (incorrectly apparently) have already assumed that i got my items sorted in the order in which they are displayed in the XML file (in the feed) but it must not be the case as far as I see in your case but also in hanslopevillage case.

I can however introduce a new sorting order in order to set them sorted by date soonest to latest in my next version.

But can you give me the feed which you use that you find reversely sorted by my plugin? I can run a few tests.

Stef

Stef,
The order displayed on the hanslopevillage site is very strange. It’s not in reverse order but almost random! I also display the feed on my Yahoo home page and it is in exactly the right order (same as the input) so something is changing the order somewhere!! The ‘standard’ WordPress RSS feed display maintains the correct order but the reason I don’t wnat to use it is that it embeds a link to the source of the RSS feed in the title – and that is not something I want users of the website to see. With your version it was easy to avoid this link being implemented.

Since the ‘I have an idea’ moment, I’ve moved house and not had time to try to implement anything – in fact, I’ve forgotten what my idea was ??

Bill

Correction – the WordPress standard RSS feed reader also gets the order wrong ??

Hi Bill (and the others),

I know: the RSS library wordpress uses – automatically (by default) – orders the items by descending dates.

That’s why both RSSjb and RSS have the same “problem”.

You need to specifically tell the software of the plugin “do not sort”. In this case, it will display the items in the order it finds in the original feed (the XML file it reads).

If this is what you want and you can wait, my next version will contain a drop down menu with a few sort options but I am not sure when i can release it.

if you want a quick and dirty solution and are willing to hack the php code, write me at stefonthenet AT gmail DOT com.

I’ll explain how to do it.

Cheers
Stef

Stef – email sent.
Thanks,
Bill

dukejames27 – for info I’ve just tried the fix that Stef refers to above and it works a treat!
Thanks Stef!!
Bill

Stef – I am also interested in reordering the feed by ascending order (the order in which it is in the feed). This would be such a useful addition to the plugin for those of us using calendar feeds from other websites. I read that you are considering this addition in the upcoming release, but could I email you for the quick fix as well? Thanks!

Kjdesign, you are welcome to contact me via the above email.