Consuming RSS Feeds in WordPress
The problem:
I wanted to display a list of the most recent articles from the various weblogs I read frequently. I used to use Google Reader, and it’s ability to share a group of “tagged”. This feature worked well when I was using my own weblog engine as I could re-format Google’s RSS feed anyway I wanted. Well, since moving over to a WordPress (WP) blog, I have lost some of that capability (it is actually there, I am just not familiar enough with WP yet). Not to worry, as a solution always exists if you ask Google nicely!
The solution
The details:
- Install FeedList
- Create a Yahoo! Pipe
- Get your pipe’s feed address
- Put the pipe’s feed address in the FeedList code
- Refresh your browser!
Pretty simple huh? I intially tried doing all of this with the WP Widget plugin and the RSS Widget. The problem with this solution is that I didn’t like the way that the Google feed was displayed with the RSS Widget. Google’s feed points back to Google Reader, and I didn’t want that to show up on my weblog, I just wanted a plain aggregation of the various feeds I read on a daily basis. So after deciding to scrap that approach, I searched Google for an RSS feed consumer for WP. Once I had installed the FeedList plugin, I had to figure out a way to get all the various feeds into the plugin! The FeedList plugin will aggregate a number of feeds into one list, but again the control issue reared it’s ugly head. In order to better control what was displayed I had to use a different tool to combine the feeds, then use FeedList to display them. Enter Yahoo! Pipes. This is an odd little tool, but it proved extremely useful in this situation. With Yahoo! Pipes, you can combine, sort, analyze and generally smoosh around data from many different sources. I was able to, rather easily, wire up a little feed combinator and pass the URL for that to FeedList. The results are a nice little list of properly formatted weblog entries from the various weblogs I read, right there in the sidebar for your viewing pleasure.
