RSS and WordPress

This post will cover several aspects of using RSS for Blog owners and readers:

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication.) allows web publishers to deliver regularly changing content as an RSS Feed for whoever wants it.

Why use RSS?

It can be time consuming to keep up with all your favourite blogs, using a Feed Reader program lets you access and view the latest content from the sites you subscribe to from one application without having to navigate to each persons site in your browser.

Viewing RSS Feeds using Feed Reader Applications;

Online RSS Feed Readers:
Google Reader
GritWire
NewsAlloy
FeedLounge
Rojo

RSS Feed Readers for Macs:
NetNewsWire by newsgator (Recommended for Mac users)
Shrook - RSS Feed Reader
Vienna - Open Source mac rss reader
NewsLife - by thinkmac
Cyndicate - $29.99

Feed Readers for Windows:
FeedReader - Similar to netnewswire for Mac (Recommended for Windows users)
FeedDemon by Newsgator
Omea Reader - All in One solution
NewzCrawler -$24.95
SharpReader - Simple free solution

Feed Services:
WordPress is capable of generating RSS Feeds right out fo the box. But for a more control of your feed I recommend signing up for a FeedBurner account.
Once your account is created you will need to point your current rss feeds to your feedburner account, this is made easy using a plugin called FeedSmith.

Displaying your feedcount:

You can either use one of the feedburner chicklets or you can output your feed count with text instead of an image using the aptly named Feed Count plugin, and style it until your hearts content.

Monitoring your competitions Feed Count:
Using the nifty SK Feedburner Stats Widget for netvibes, you can enter multiple Feedburner URL’s and monitor there feedcounts to see how your shaping up against your competition, or even your own sites.

I have my feed at the top currently 6 RSS Subscribers today (not bad for a 72 hour old blog) along with some already established blogs covering the same niche below.

Plugins:

RSS Stream - displays your social feeds in a lifestream way
©Feed - Extends the feed! A report of copyright, a digital fingerprint and the IP of the feed reader can be added.
Feed WordPress - tom/RSS aggregator for WordPress
Feed Cache Pipes - Caches RSS Feeds for display on your WP sidebar.
RSS Footer - Places a link in the RSS Feeds footer linking back to your blog.

Free RSS Icons:

Feed Icons
Glass Style Icons
3D RSS Icons
Circle RSS Icons
Nyssa Brown 3D RSS Icon Pack

If you found this post useful consider Subscribing to our RSS Feed for up to the minute updates of our latest posts.

OS Designer has released a free CSS Gallery theme for WordPress.

Clean simple design, integrated tagging, google ad spots and 125×125 banner spots.

Demo
Download

What is WassUp?

WassUp is a statistics plugin for checking your stats in real time from within the admin panel. I have been following the development of WassUp for a couple of months, and It’s improved leaps and bounds since previous versions. With the latest version 1.4.7 it’s had a major overhaul and a lot of the previous bugs appear to have been resolved.

Why use it?

You could of course use other stats programs such as Awstats, google analytics, haveamint etc. But those options either take a while (up to 24 hours) before reporting results or you have to pay for a license. WassUp is a free plugin and it starts tracking your visitors as soon as you install it. There’s no modifying of code necessary. Literally once you’ve activated the plugin it will start tracking your visitors.

The fact it’s specifically made for WordPress has advantages over other statistic options, such as Widget support for displaying stats easily to your visitors.

Resources:

Download
User Guide
Support Forum

Screenshots:

This post is for those that are not aware or familiar with “Ping/Update Services”. At the bottom of the Writing menu in the admin panel (Options/Writing) is a box for entering URLs to ping services, when you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the sites listed in the update services.

By default WordPress only has one URL listed which is to the ping-o-matic site, although ping-o-matic will notify several sites/services that you have created a new post there are literally hundreds of others, but for the purpose of this post I’ll list the most popular ping services:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrp
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://pinger.onejavastreet.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

So what are the benefits of using ping services?

In short Traffic. If you are just starting a brand new WordPress blog, these URLs will help get you listed in Search Engines quicker, as they themselves are sites regularly crawled by search engines. Services like Technorati, show your latest blog posts and sites that have linked to you. This works in the reverse that if you link to somebody else they can easily find the link on there own Technorati page and may follow it to see what you were discussing. Other sites like blo.gs list the most recent updated blogs.

What does it actually do?

Every time you publish a new post it will send a “ping” to all the URLs you have listed, Notifying them you have updated your site so they crawl your blog quicker.

I only posted what is in my opinion the most relevant services to ping, if you know of some others or think I left some important ones out let me know in the comments.

WordPress 2.5 is just around the corner (Scheduled for a March release). There’s going to be some major changes in 2.5 including a redesigned back-end.

Immediately after logging in you will notice the face-lift changes. So far I personally like where the new back-end layout is heading, although I’m sure there will be a lot who don’t. As usual when you first login you are greeted with the dashboard, it looks like they are heading towards a widgetized dashboard similar to the myDashboard plugin for that netvibes/pageflakes look and feel. This is a feature request I made in a blog post on the welovewp blog, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see it’s actually happening.

The menu layout has slightly changed as well as the names of some of the options:

Dashboard now appears top left above your blogs title and below the title are the options: Write, Manage, Design (currently presentation), Comments. It’s worth noting there’s a small bubble above the comments that displays the latest comments in moderation. This is a welcome addition as it tells you how many new comments you have without having to go into the tab.

On the same row but further right there are Plugins, Users, Settings (currently Options). For the most part each menu option has a very similar layout to the current branch of WordPress.

There’s a demo of an alpha release of 2.5 back-end here:

http://wp.chrisjohnston.org/wp-admin/

Login:

user: admin
pass: demo

What features would you most like to see integrated into future versions of WordPress? I’ll be compiling a list of mine and and submitted ones for a future post.

By default WordPress url’s look like the following:

http://wpsource.com/?p=1

Besides being ugly there not very informative or Search Engine friendly. Thankfully WordPress makes it extremely easy to modify.

How to Change the Default Permalinks to ‘Pretty’ Permalinks

To modify the default permalink structure, you need to go to “Options/Permalinks” in your admin panel and select “Custom Structure:” then create your own from the following examples

The options for permalinks:

%year%

Outputs the year of the post e.g 2008

%monthnum%

The Month of the year e.g 02

%day%

Day the post was published e.g 25

%hour%

Hour of the day, e.g 15

%minute%

Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second%

Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname%

The post title (or post slug field). Example this posts title “Optimizing Wordpress Permalinks” becomes optimizing-wordpress-permalinks . (note it’s all lower case and spaces are replaced with a dash.

%post_id%

The unique ID # of the post, e.g 2

%category%

Same as postname except it outputs the Category name from the slug field.

%author%

This outputs the authors name e.g Josh

Advanced Permalinks:

You can combine any of the above strings in any order e.g
/%day%/%month%/%year%/%category%/%author%/%postname%/

the above example would create links that look like the following:
http://wpsource.com/25/02/2008/news/josh/optimising-wordpress-permalinks/

The most popular permalink structures:

The most popular permalink structures people prefer using are:

/%postname%/ outputs just the title of the post from the post slug field.

/%category%/%postname%/ this outputs the category e.g “news” then the title of the post e.g “optimizing-wordpress-permalinks”

/%day%/%month%/%year%/%category%/%postname%/ this outputs the date in uk format (dd/mm/yyyy) then the category of the post and finally the post title

/% month%/%day%/%year%/%category%/%postname%/ same as above except this uses the us date format (mm/dd/yyyy)

Note:

Allthough you can use any combination of the above permalink options it’s always a good idea to end your permalink structure with %postname% or %post_is% otherwise you will probably break your URL’s

What do I use?

Depends greatly on the type of site im running, on this blog I simply use /%category%/%postname%/ this is widely regarded as the best SEO permalink structure to use. For most of my non WordPress related sites I use a combination of the above preffered methods.

Plugins:

Netfirms Pretty Permalinks

jadedcoder Sticky Permalinks

Redirect Old Slugs

sCategory Permalink