Aggregating RSS with WordPress

I have been working away recently on a little project to bring together all of the RSS feeds of members of Palimpsest, the discussion forum I maintain. I have used third party arrangements, like KickRSS and Suprglu in the past, neither of which were wholly satisfactory. I’m a regular reader of the WordPress Planet – which pulls together influential WordPress based feeds – and one for the Anglian LUG. So I thought perhaps it would be best to host the aggregated feeds myself, using either the Python based Planet or the PHP MetaPlanet.

An hour’s fiddling last night made it clear that both were beyond my modest abilities. So, I needed another solution. I found it – a WordPress plug-in that aggregates feeds and spews out separate posts for each item. The title of each posts acts as a link back to the originating site. I soon had it up and running, and it seems to work really well for a quick-and-dirty solution. 

A great option for those wanting to create a blogging community.

The Long Mynd

We returned to the Long Mynd today, for a stroll. Also, we were road testing the new rucksack we bought with some vouchers we received for the wedding. We had an excellent time and the backpack was just what we were after: i.e. it was big.

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We walked along the hill to Lightspout Waterfall, which at only 4 metres high doesn’t quite seem to deserve the nickname “miniature Niagara” which Victorian visitors gave it. Still, it was a fairly gentle walk, with only a couple of drag-yourself-along-with-your-hands moments, which only add to the fun anyway. Once we reached the waterfall we stopped for refreshments, though some steps led to a further walk, which we might try sometime.

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Good fun though, and as ever we left promising to come back sooner than this time was. That makes sense, right?

Playing with Google

Have spent a little time playing with a couple of Google products which have changed since I last used them – both for the better. Firstly, Google Reader, which was rubbish before, and now is a lot better. As is probably obvious, it’s an online RSS aggregator, like BlogLines (only a bit worse). It’s had a pretty thorough makeover, all of which makes it quicker and more user friendly. It won’t become my regular feed reader (FeedDemon at home and BlogLines on the move) but I’ll keep an eye on it. It has another use though, which I mention below…

Reader

The other thing I played with was the personalised home page. You can now have more than one page of stuff, which is nice, not least because the range of things you can do now has increased. I have set mine to to have one page with my Gmail, Calendar, BBC News headlines, del.icio.us bookmarks, and some useful searches:

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Then a second page with some feeds that I regularly scan, along with a Google Reader summary of all my feeds, so I can quickly check what’s new.

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The third and last page has a few games on it that have become available. Plenty of oppotunities for wasted minutes there…

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I’ve added the personalised homepage to my FireFox startup pages – it’s pretty useful.

Note: I wrote this post, as I do all of mine these days, using the BlogJet editor. It automatically generated the thumbnails shown above, which is pretty cool, and makes my life easier…

Favourite Photos

I recently did what I have been meaning to do for a while, and created a Flickr set of my favourite photos (that I’ve taken). It’s a bit annoying that Flickr doesn’t give the set URLs a more human look, but there we go.

I’ll start posting photos from this set on here now and again – probably when other stuff is a bit slow. Here’s the first one, a view of the gardens at Powys Castle, and beyond:

Powys Castle

Fuerteventura

We spent our honeymoon in Fuerteventura. I say honeymoon, but B came along too. We stayed at The Occidental Grand, a huge hotel in the middle of nowhere. A real turn-up and flop-out sort of place: just what we wanted. All the photos are on Flickr.

View around the hotel 2

My first all-inclusive holiday, and I quickly learned the error of my ways when it came to the buffet meals. A couple of times to start with I indulged in my usual pile-it-high method, and came away pretty disappointed. It was then I realised that, even though there is tonnes of food about, you are actually really only meant to eat one meal at a time. Once I figured that out, it was fine.

View around the hotel 1

I managed to get well covered in sunburn on the first day, and indeed my tummy was a particularly excrutiating shade of pink for most of the week.

The sea wasn’t far away, and I spent many a happy hour bobbing about, rolling around on the waves. Had a little fun allowing myself to be submerged by some of the bigger ones, but then it started hurting and wasn’t so much fun after all.

Floater

The week went far too quickly, of course, but we all had a fabulous time. Roll on the next one.