Herself's Webtools

I’ve been wanting a magazine style template for my main website splash page for about six months. And I’d been wondering how those scrapers, scraped you rss feed into their blog. Sometimes procrastination is a good thing when I finally got around to looking into it all I found most of the pieces had already been written.

Herself’s Green Things picks up the rss feeds from all my websites, turns them into blog posts and posts them in a magazine style theme all automatically.

I tried all the magazine themes I could find on the WordPress theme pages. The Magadine theme was the one that was most stable and easiest to hack so that’s the one I choose. Colors and fonts are very easy to change as are the number of columns and rows. ( change rows and columns in index.php )

<?php
if($count == 2 ) {
echo “<div style=’clear:both;’></div>”;
$count = 0;
}else{
$count += 1;
}
?>

count == 2 will give you 3 columns, count == 1 will give you two, count == 3 gives you four columns.

There are several WP plugins that will turn rss feeds into posts.  I chose Syndication which appears to have been pulled by the author because he/she didn’t want spammers using it.  That’s a shame, maybe if you ask nicely the coder will give you a copy, I’ll respect the coder’s wishes and not provide copies.  I like it best because it turns the title of the post into a link back to the original blog.

There are about a half dozen other choices available on the WordPress plugins site.  Try them all see what suits you best. I thought WP-o-Matic and FeedWordPress also did excellent jobs.

After activating your syndication plugin you tell it which feeds to pull and all the ones I looked at gave you several options for credit, links how much of the feed entry to post ect.

Now you shouldn’t have to be told you should only be pulling your own content as I’m doing, or content from other blogs where you have permission.  It can be a great way to consolidate your blogs or promote other’s blogs.

You should also only use partial feeds to keep the search engine gods happy, and clicking on the title of the post should take your viewer to the original entry not wandering around the consolidated site.

One problem I had is that I couldn’t fetch 4 of my 13 feeds. I have no idea what or why so what I did was great a Yahoo Pipe of all my blog feeds, then have the syndication plugin grab that feed.

One of the more fun things to do with your blog is to post to it remotely from Flickr, your cell phone, email etc. I remote post to my personal blog, the rest I sit at a computer and log in to to write posts.

If you only write posts while logged onto WordPress you don’t need xmlrpc.php. This file is included only for remote publishing. When I installed WordPress 2.7 I turned off trackbacks and xmlrpc in my settings.

Despite turning it off the non-technical sites got slammed with trackback spam and comment postings from non users. Akismet caught all of it but I’d rather not have it even hitting Akismet.

If you do not do remote publishing on your blog I strongly recommend deleting the xmlprc.php file. Many of the WordPress security updates have come from problems with this file and assuming you haven’t done anything too creative with your WordPress install it’s your weakest link in security.

If you post to your blog from Flickr, email, Google Docs or similar clients you’ll need to leave in xmlrpc.php as they need it as an interface to talk to your blog.

If you allow trackbacks on your blog you need to leave the trackback.php file in your WordPress install. If like me, you don’t allow trackbacks, go ahead and delete trackback.php. For me the spam to legit trackback ratio is just too high to be worth the trouble.

I don’t know why turning both of these off in 2.7 doesn’t work, perhaps a future patch will correct it?

More information:
How to combat WordPress trackback spam
Guide to reducing WordPress Trackback spam and comments
XML-RPC at SourceForge
XML-RPC WordPress Codex
Weblog Client (lists clients that require xmlrpc on WordPress )
XML-RPC Changes in WordPress 2.7
XML Rewriting Attacks: Existing Solutions and their Limitations