Jul | 23 | 2006

Adding a page for your favorite feeds

Posted by Professor as Blog Tutorial, Tips

This tip is directed to WordPress users. Everyone of us has a set of feeds that we constantly read and if you think about it, it would also be nice to have them accessible on your blog.

Feeds are useful because you don’t always have to go to the actual sites to access the bits of news and information. And if you think that you need a way to filter entries that are relevant for you and you would like to read more, you could have an RSS aggregator of sorts in your own blog.

[tags]blogs,rss,feeds[/tags]
How? Check this out so you know.

Plugins needed:

Steps:

Download the plugins and extract them.
Upload them to your /wp-content/plugins folder. Always remember that plugins go there unless specified otherwise by the one who wrote the plugin.
After you have successfully uploaded them, go to the Dashboard of your WordPress blog. Activate PHP-Exec, as well as BDP-RSS.
After activating both plugins, it’s time to have a bit of fun. It’s time to change the settings of BDP-RSS. You could manage it by selecting “Manage” in your Dashboard. From there, click RSS and you now have the admin panel for it. The instructions from there are pretty simple. To quote it:

1. add the feeds you wish to provide on your site
2. create an output format that will be used to output the feeds collected
3. place a call to the BDPRSS2::output(n) function (for example) in your side bar, where the argument ‘n’ is the output format identifier

On the page you will have the steps outlined and the fields are easy to fill up. The important thing is that you know all the URLs of the feeds you want to add. If not, you could check out the blogs and get the URLs so you could have them already. Once you’re done adding feeds, go to step 2, as mentioned in the BDP-RSS admin panel. This will determine how your feeds would appear.
Create a new page where you want your feeds to show up. Then call BDP-RSS. (As defined by step 3 in the BDP-RSS admin panel.) You have PHP-Exec installed so this works like a charm! An example call to it would be:
< ?php BDPRSS2::output(1); ?>
See? It’s basically calling the PHP function. It’s not intimidating once you have set it up already. After which you could just keep on adding and deleting feeds as you see fit. Also, you could change the number of the output, depending on which output format you would like to use.

How tough could it be? It is fairly easy and does not require too much hacking so you could start sharing the things you enjoy reading quite easily. (Maybe you read blogs that have language tutorials? Wouldn’t it be neat to have them all in one place?) Don’t forget to add a link to your feeds page on your blogroll or somewhere on top of your blog. It is all up to you how you use it and share it with others.

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