Over the past several days I’ve been looking at how to integrate external posts into this blog. Not everyone has a feed reader and many of my clients don’t even care. So I thought it would be nice to show some recent articles from blogs that I think are interesting to the folks that I help.
Things started with a nice little WordPress plugin from Stuff By Sarah called What Others Are Saying. I think it’s a cool concept – it uses the links from your blogroll to grab recent posts for you to put into your sidebar. I installed it on my test server to check it out and tweak the code to get the format like I wanted.
But a funny thing happened on the way to adding more elements from the feed. I discovered SimplePie which is drop dead simple and easy as pie to use. Hence the name I guess.
Of course being a software developer I appreciate being able to work things out in code. Since it’s written as a PHP class there is a lot of potential in its ability to be used on this blog and elsewhere.
I’m excited about integrating it into some sites we’re working on. Watch this space for how it’ll get used. Or head over to the SimplePie website and watch the tutorials on how to get it up and working quickly and give it a try on your own.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }