Simon Wheatley

Feeding WordPress

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simonwheatley
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The first round of enhancing the site is complete: my Last.FM journal articles and del.icio.us bookmarks are now republished here.
The site is run with WordPress, a piece of software which makes managing a personal site really simple. To help style my site I’m using the K2 theme for WordPress by Michael Heilmann, which provides a good base from which I can customise over time.

Luckily the content I publish on other services, like del.icio.us and Last.FM, is syndicated; this means that is is available as a computer readable file, called an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed, as well as the normal web pages. Charles Johnson has written an extension to WordPress called FeedWordpress, which makes integrating this syndicated content really easy. I’ve simply pointed FeedWordpress at the various feeds, and it periodically checks them for new material.

(There has been some jiggery-pokery to get FeedWordpress working with WordPress 2.0, for which I’ve used Tomas France’s adaptation of the extension. I’ve further adapted FeedWordpress myself, to pull in the del.icio.us tags and to show an appropriate icon by republished content; here’s the source code.) Code now lost in the mists of time.

Update: The jiggery pokery is no longer necessary! Charles has released an update, FeedWordpress v0.98, which is now compatible with WP2.0. Now I just need to merge my adaptations in with the new version.

Comments

8 responses to “Feeding WordPress”

  1. Kenneth S Avatar
    Kenneth S

    hello simon in the UK

    We have made some posts each on the radgeeks site about feedwordpress plugin…

    Simon: Thanx, now I dont get any emailreports, is that equal to a working rssfeed?
    I am unsure if the plugin updates my blog automatic or just when I visit the blog (if I look at the postings date and timestamp its older then actual time when I visit but thats just because timestamp is equal to the news own posting on the real site that I am receiving my feed from right?)
    s**t my english isnt that good hope you understand ;(

    Another question; the new posts doesnt seem to be included in the categorys “number of posts in each category” (look at http://www.allvetaren.se )
    posted January 21st, 2006 7:50:41 am
    KSvensson said:

    yes my new croncommand in cpanel is now:
    /usr/bin/curl http://allvetaren.se/wp-content/update-feeds.php -sS -d update=quiet -d log=xxx -d pwd=xxx

    Simon is that what you meant?

    Also Simon, do you know if its possible to format the rssfedd when it comes to collor of text, sixe of text, length of text etc?

    many regards

    from Kenneth in Sweden

    Reply
  2. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Hi Kenneth

    My Swedish is worse than your English I’m afraid.

    If you’re getting the content out of the feed and into your blog, then that’s a big step forward well done! If you are getting the posts imported from your feed without you visiting the update-feeds.php page yourself then everything is fine; Feedwordpress does not import posts when you visit a “normal” blog page.

    Yes, the date for each post will be the date from the feed.

    It looks like the numbers of posts in categories is correct now, although it’s difficult to say without understanding Swedish. Once Feedwordpress has created a post there is nothing special about it compared to a post that you’ve created manually, so I’d be surprised if the counts were not correct.

    It is possible to format posts which have come in from the feed, but it will require you to edit your templates. I’ve created a further extension, specific to me and my feeds, which allows me to use code like this:
    {if IsLastFMPost()}<!-- show icon for Last.FM -->{/if}
    You can do something similar by checking the function get_syndication_source() to see which feed it is from.

    Hope all this helps…

    Reply
  3. kenneth s Avatar
    kenneth s

    Hello again Simon and thanx a lot for your answers!

    what i meant by formating the feeds was if one could decide how long text to show up in the blog and what color and fontsize to use for text etc.
    YOu know about that?

    also have problems with this: i can choose to for visitors to reply to the posted feeds OR to have a link to the feedsource so visitors can reed the whole newsarticle BUT i cant have both of them wich would be the best…
    i want people that reads the feed (that is short presented on my blog) to be able to first click on the feeds header to read more about it at the sourcesite and then maybe come back and leave a comment on the blog…i thought that was the meaning but havent been able to configure my blog to manage that..
    Have you tried that or have any clue?

    many regards

    Kenneth S
    sweden

    Reply
  4. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Hi Kenneth

    If you look at the custom fields for an article created by FeedWordpress (FW), you will see the following value, syndication_feed. This is the link to the original article. You can extract this in your WordPress template using the tag the_syndication_permalink().

    I don’t think you have any control over the length of text that FW imports.

    To control the styling of an article syndicated in by FW, you will need to set a custom class on one of the HTML elements containing the article. For example:
    [div class="post" id="post-[?php the_ID(); ?]"]

    (Convert the square brackets to triangular ones, obviously.) You will then be able to style the syndicated posts using CSS.

    Good luck,

    Simon

    Reply
  5. Rad Geek Avatar
    Rad Geek

    For what it’s worth, the jiggery-pokery should no longer be necessary; initial support for WP 2.0 is now incorporated into version 0.98 (just released). Cf. FeedWordPress 0.98: Now compatible with WordPress 2.0.

    Also note that this upgrade fixes a subtle bug with category post counts that a lot of users have reported, but which the diffs that have been floating around don’t fix.

    HTH!

    Reply
  6. NorthSpace

    […] A quick search didn’t get me very far (although it did lead me to Blaze, where I discovered my new design). But then I came across Simon Wheatley’s site, where he’s done exactly what I wanted using a plugin called FeedWordPress. Beyond just Last.fm integration, this amazing tool can take any RSS feed and integrate it as blog entries directly in your site. I’m sure I can think of a few other uses for it. So now you’ll see that my only Last.fm journal entry is now part of NorthSpace. Coolness. […]

    Reply
  7. Quiana Waughtal Avatar
    Quiana Waughtal

    Very Good website man Thanks

    Reply
  8. love4ever Avatar
    love4ever

    is there any way the FW can parse RegEX?

    Reply

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