Ask YC: Blog parsing (WordPress,Typepad,Blogger)

[samson]

I'm trying to develop a crawler that knows when the page being sent to it is the actually a Post page, and not the index,search,tag,calendar(November 2008) page.

I want these pages ->http://1vibe.net/music/jim-jones-ft-lil-wayne-noe-twista-jackin-swagga-from-us/

Not this ->http://1vibe.net/category/behind-the-scenes/ Not this ->http://1vibe.net/2008/11/ Not this ->http://1vibe.net/tag/50-cent/

From the blog post page I want to grab the title and date of that post

The way I trying to do it was to look through the DOM of the site and look for consistency. I found consistency in Blogger and Typepad but WordPress was all over the place in the formating from site to site.

So I figure I must have been doing it wrong and that there is the xml,rdf,feeds a.k.a, the intelligent way of doing it.

I appreicate it if anyone could help ( also I'm doing it in php).

[raquo]

If you are interested only in new posts, you can look in blogs' RSS feeds. They are nearly always in default locations.

Or you could parse the URL - I had a similar task some time ago, and I went with URLs - Blogger and Typepad are consistent; WordPress depends on the blog, of course, but you could figure out several most popular patterns (e. g. /yyyy/mm/dd/posttitle, /id-posttitle) and get like 90% of all blogs right.

Or maybe, just maybe, you could use some third parties that have already figured it out via RSS - maybe Technorati?

[samson]

Yea, I think thats the route i'll end up going, I've already started developing a pattern system, and overnight I thought of a few ways that might make that easier to get the title and date of a page.

There's only one thing I'm still stumped on and thats simply how do you tell when your on the original article page and not the index/tag/search/ that still sometimes contains the same content as the article page.

[Raphael]

Just parse the URL. Or you can pull in the RSS feed, although that usually only goes back 20 posts.