Well, I’ve scratched the rss feed itch. Ever since I did the first version of participo/knowledge pool, I wanted to have feeds from other, relevant, websites in the sidebar. But I wanted to control the feeds to just have an excerpt, and the five most recent items.
At the time, the only way I could figure out how to include these feeds was by using Ben Brown’s rssmonkey, a super simple and very slick rss display tool, but ultimately it lacked any control over the structure of the feeds and slowed the site to a crawl as every presentation needed an include that ran the parser when the page displayed.
So, I’m on holiday, take some time off from the dissertation and did the folllowing:
1) Upgraded Movable Type to version 2.51 – this is now running from MySQL – as yet untapped possibilities
2) Changed templates to only show four most recent entries and then the next four as excerpts only – should equate to faster load times
3) Installed the mt-rssfeed plug-in. Configured it, played around. Repeat ad naseum. Finally got it working
4) Changed the name if the site to participo – eventually I’ll sort out proper hosting and so on, but knowledge pool was a bit rusty
If you post, you may see a few errors appear – if any of the 12+ rss feeds are broken, the rss plugin spits an error – it will all work ok though.
And I’ve just mailed the author – he wrote an interestign o’reilly article on RSS, plus from the feeds I came across this.
Well that’s it – next maintenance job is to overhaul the css and set the whole of the rss feeds to cron – thank-you and goodnight :-)