Posting MMWR Articles to the Mobile RSS Feed with Blob the Builder

itUse this article to post newly released Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to the RSS feed used by the MMWR Express mobile application.  The article contents are turned into code that can be easily read by the mobile application which looks at the feed for new information.

Step-by-step guide

For each MMWR Article in a release, use Photon Admin to generate JSON blurb that will be read by the mobile app and paste it into the MMWR Mobile RSS Feed.

1. Load Photon Admin, also known as "Blob the Builder":  (Easy link to remember:  http://bit.ly/iiublob) in one browser tab
2. Load the latest MMWR release in another tab and select an article.
3. Copy the URL from the article and paste it into the "Article URL" field of the MMWR
   

4. Click "Auto Fetch Article" which will cause blob the builder to pull article details and often several fields
   

   Article Parser

   Sometimes, the tunneling API used by the article parser is inoperative.  This will make the "Auto Fetch Article" button inoperative.
   
   If you scroll to the bottom of the page you will see an "Article Parser" radio button.  You can select "Whatever Origin" instead of "EDemo" and try to parse the article again.
   
   Either way, it is likely than you will need to contact the owners of the page and ask them to restart the parser, or figure out whether a format change in the MMWR articles caused the article parser to stop working.  As a workaround, you can click the "Edit Article Fields" button and enter items manually to get a blurb.

   Early Release Articles

   Early Release articles do not have an Issue Number and may have an early-date. If you are entering an early release article click "Edit Article Fields" to edit the Issue Number.
   
   If you want the article to be grouped with an upcoming MMWR article, enter the issue date for the corresponding MMWR release (so an early release on Tuesday, March 6th, should have an Issue Date of Thursday, March 8th). If you enter the early release date, it will get it's own article heading in the app.

5. Enter Article Subjects (Keywords, etc) in the "Article Subjects" section.  
   
   

   Don't use Word

   Be careful if using Microsoft Office Tools like Word or Outlook: They can change Quotations (") to left and right quotations that will confound the article subject parser, ultimately corrupting the blob.

6. Click "Serialize Form Values"
   
7. Use the spell-checker. 
   1. If anything is misspelled, correct it and then re-click the serialize Form Values button.
8. Open the link to the CDC's RSS feed manager http://toolsadmin.cdc.gov/medialibraryadmin/Feeds/Feeds.htm?view=detail&id=342419
   
9. Navigate to "feeds"
   
10. Select feed detail for feed 342419 (search for feed 342419 if it is not pre-highlighted)
    
11. Scroll Down and Select "Add Feed Item"
    
12. Select "Start with Blank Form"
    
13. Add the feed item
    
    1. Paste in the JSON blurb from MMWR Mobile Admin into the description
    2. Paste in the URL to the MMWR Article in Source URL
    3. Set the Title in the Title
       1. This is completely up to you, generally the format followed has been "YYYY-MM-DD/Vol. NN/No. NN | \[insert title here\]
    4. Set the media status radio button to "Published" with the current time and date,
       1. Sometimes, you may get an error publishing.  More often than not, it is related to some character that is not recognized by the Media Admin engine, most often it has been an m-dash... and it's random as several m-dashes have gone through no problem.
14. Click "Save Changes"
15. Repeat 3-13 for every item in the MMWR article.
    1. You may need to click the "Clear Article" button in Blob the Builder/MMWR-Admin before loading a new article to avoid caching of old keywords.
16. When done, send a note to The IIU Contact (Currently Peter) and cc InformaticsLab@cdc.gov with the message to be pushed.  Peter will then send a push to the App to let people know they have new articles.

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