RSS Feeds???

  • politisense · Member ·

    Would I be able to link to other blogs so I could get the RSS feed from them into my site, and visa versa. Did I explain this right and if so, how would I do this?

    If I found another blog that had content that complimented mine, would I be able to link its articles to mine and mine to theirs if they so chose? How would I do this? Are there search engine benefits to do this or is it looked at poorly?

    Where do I find the address for the feed? I just have the address for the full blog. Will it place these fed posts on the right menu bar or will they be treated like my posts?

    Thanks for bearing with the “new guy.”

  • charleskrause · Member ·

    For their content/headlines/links to appear on your site…

    That depends on where you want the links to go.

    The “Sidebar Widgets” (Dashboard -> Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets) includes RSS widgets. You would drag one of these RSS widgets into your sidebar, click on the configuration icon (the one that looks like a small browser window on the right hand side), and enter the URI for the RSS feed in that. Presto! The latest articles published on the other blog will appear as a list of links in your sidebar.

    If you want to put the actual articles in your blog as blog articles, that is trickier. I know of no way to do so automatically on wordpress.com hosted blogs, but you can always do this manually, or (what is more polite) add a paragraph or so of commentary on the article and creating a link to their article.

    As for finding the address for their feed on their blog page, you’ll have to hunt a bit. It will be on their page. Do a text search for ‘feed’, ‘syndication’, or ‘RSS’ would be my advice. They won’t be making it hard to find. Looking in the page footer and/or sidebar for the link is also a good idea.

    For your content to appear on their site…

    They would have to do something similar as what I suggested above. You can’t just make your content appear on other people’s blogs :) I assume, however, that this is something you both want to do.

  • politisense · Member ·

    Thanks for clearing some things up for me.

    If I have another’s articles feed into my site, is there any way I can filter the content, ie: if a new article appears that is offensive, how would I stop it from displaying on my site? Is this possible?

    Thanks for your time.

  • charleskrause · Member ·

    As I’ve said, including the actual article on your blog would require that you manually place them there – as opposed to maintaining a list of links derived from their RSS feed (which is what the RSS Widget I described above does). Since this is the case, you could easily “censor” the output by deciding not to place a copy of the article on your blog.

    If you use the RSS widget to display a list of links to the most recent articles from their blog (up to 10), then there is no way that I know of to automatically filter “offensive content” from the feed – basically because this is not built into the RSS feed widget, and it is unlikely ever to be built into the widget as there is no way to programatically define “offensive material”.

    In short, if you want to add complete articles and/or filter articles based on content you will have to do so manually.

    You can manually maintain a list of links using the “text widgets” and past in an unordered list as HTML if you wish. This would allow you to filter links as well. This is, however, starting to get way off topic from your original question.

  • politisense · Member ·

    Since we are getting off topic, I have another question. First, thanks for clearing up the RSS thing. I will implement your advice in a widget to only blogs that I trust content from, as this will be easiest.

    Here is another semi-related topic that I am hoping will be easy to answer for the more experienced blogger.

    This site, http://blog.geekwithfibroids.com/, uses my theme according to the bottom of their page, yet has a static page with a custom header with an active menu bar that has changing hypertabs as the mouse crosses them. How is this done? Is this what is done with CSS? If so, could I customize the CSS so that a similar active header appears on all of my pages? This would allow me to move the custom header description to the body of the first page and retain the message on the home blog page. I really like this. Or, are there templates you offer that would help do this?

    Thanks for your time.

  • raincoaster · Member ·

    If you want to add complete articles and you don’t have the specific permission of the copyright holder, you’re going to get into trouble. Blogs that do that are called blog scrapers, and they are not generally considered respectable.

    Just use the widget to post the titles of the articles as charles has explained.

  • charleskrause · Member ·

    raincoaster is correct. Usually blogs that mirror each other’s content and links have a mutual agreement to do so. “Pirating” someone else’s content is usually considered bad form. Using someone else’s RSS feed isn’t – as the feed is generally available anyways, and generates new traffic to the originating blog.

    As for the custom header issue – I don’t use your theme, but I suspect that the them has a “custom header” option under the presentation menu.

    As far as the other issues are concerned, I’m not sure what you mean. The same “active menu” is part of your blog as well – all “tabs” at the top are links to static pages. If you add a static page to your blog, it will automatically generate a new tab.

  • eclecticgeek · Member ·

    @politisense:

    You are referring to my blog so I will attempt to answer what I can.

    Static page?
    Admin Dashboard > Options > Reading
    You can set it there.

    Custom header?
    Created that using GIMP ‘cuz it’s free and works quite well. Upload under Presentation > Custom Image Header

    Hypertabs?
    Should work for everyone. I didn’t do anything special and don’t use custom CSS.

    Attempting to get back on topic: :D
    I use RSS widgets to include news and research feeds in my sidebar.

  • politisense · Member ·

    Thanks for all the great advice. I have not and will not post articles from other’s without their permission and would make sure credit is given. The RSS Feed thing is new to me so there may be some other questions as I attempt it.

    ElecticGeek, I really like your custom header. I had originally thougt we were using the same header and then I check and saw that that wasn’t true, although I recently changed to it. This is the reason for the active tab question earlier, since the header I thought was the same as yours didn’t have these. I see now that your header was different and when I switched these same active tabs appeared. Oops.

    A combination question for you since this header is new and I have never used an static home page: Where do I access the fields to populate for the static page and where can I set the active tabs at the bottom of the header?

    Thanks for all your help.

  • eclecticgeek · Member ·

    Thanks for the kind words. :)

    You can create a static page and then make that your front page.
    Dashboard > Write > Write Page

    After you create and save a page, go to
    Options > Reading

    There is a Front Page section where you can set it.

    Tabs are just pages. Like charleskrause mentioned, once you create and save new pages, they become new tabs.

  • politisense · Member ·

    I hope your Christmas and New Years were great. I developed more questions over the holidays.

    Using a custom header means that the “title” and “tagline” fields must be empty. Aren’t these fields two of the grading criteria for determining SEO? I think so, and was wondering what the work-around to this is. Is there a method that I can enter keywords like this for SEO?

    What other steps would help my blog, http://www.considercommonsense.com, obtain more views?

    Thanks for the comments regarding use of articles in my site. All these articles belong to this site and any articles from another blogger will be viewed through RSS feeds. I still haven’t experimented with them yet, but will soon.

    Thanks again.

  • timethief · Member ·

    How to promote your blog accounts for many threads that can be found in the forum search box. There is also advice to be found in the FAQs blog. In case you have yet to become acquainted with basic wordpress resources here’s a link that will be helpful http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=5257&replies=16
    This thread addresses search engine questions http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=5859&replies=9
    Also drmike has created a blog that has tips for you to note http://pimpmyblog.wordpress.com
    P.S. This thread has gone completely off track so I’m adding a couple of tags to it.

  • politisense · Member ·

    Thanks timethief. I will not add to this thread any longer. as you are right that I have taken too many twists and turns.

    Have a nice 2007 and I am sure I will here from you on other threads.

  • timethief · Member ·

    I hope the links I gave you proved to be useful. Have a great New Year too. :)

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