The following is a list of the available fields for both the Feed object itself and the Entries objects associated as articles in the channel.

FeedNormalizer::Feed

• title
• description
• id
• last_updated
• copyright
• authors / author
• urls / url
• image
• generator
• items / channel

FeedNormalizer::Entry

• content
• description
• title
• date_published
• urls / url
• id
• authors / author
• copyright
• categories

Etags

Etags and last_modified are crucial elements to sending proper request headers if you hope to receive conditional get responses and save yourself some overhead in feed processing. FeedNormalizer does not provide access to these elements as they are actually part of the http response headers, and not the feed itself.

While heavily studying the art of feed processing, I encountered Feezirra and Feedtosis, both excellent libraries for feed processing. My own application required a modified version of their concept, but there was a lot to learn in their code.

Feedtosis uses the HttpHeaders process to collect this information from a Curl::Easy object. I adapted the Feedtosis code to meet my needs like this:

require 'http_headers'

class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
  def store_header_information
    headers = HttpHeaders.new(curl.header_str)
    self.response_code = curl.response_code
    self.etag = headers.etag unless headers.etag.nil?
    self.last_modified = headers.last_modified unless headers.last_modified.nil?
  end
end

$ gem server

This will start the gem server at port 8808, so to access the html from your browser, use the following url:

http://localhost:8808/

Note that this only access the documentation for Gems that are installed locally on your server.