Widgets were built into the basic structure of Wordpress about a bazzilion versions ago. One of those widgets native to Wordpress is the RSS Widget. It is a very powerful tool for WordPress bloggers but I don’t see it being used very often.
We all know that fresh content is one of the things Google bots love. Feed them regularly and they will return to eat more often. But is isn’t always easy to keep fresh content ready for the hungry little bots and like birds if you don’t keep the food our they will find other places to eat.
Using RSS Widgets
One way to keep things changing is through the RSS widget. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.
Author Multiple Sites RSS Feed
If you author more than one blog you could be feeding content back and forth between them in an RSS Widget. It is easy to copy your feed into the widget and select the number of post you want in the feed. This way every time you publish a new post you create new content for both blogs.
You can Feed Any Feed
If you can feed it you can put it in an RSS Widget. Want to let the readers on your blog know what you are tweeting about on Twitter. You don’t need a widget from another source. You can put your twitter stream in an RSS widget and display it on your blog.
I’m not saying this is a good idea. From some of what I’ve read in tweets you wouldn’t want that on your blog. But it illustrates it can be done.
RSS Feed a Hashtag
Hashtags are used in Twitter to create a kind of thread. You simply put a # in front of number, letter, combination there of and you have a hashtag anyone starting a tweet with the same hashtag make it search able for that particular tag.
You could create a hashtag, create an RSS feed for that tag when searching for it on Twitter then past the feed URL into an RSS Widget on your WordPress blog. This allows you to tweet specific information to your blog by including a hashtag. Probably better than your entire Twitter stream being displayed.
Multiple Blogs, create a hashtag for each blog and you can tweet directly to the specific blog, Micro blogging within your blog. Creating fresh new content on the fly.
RSS Feeds are Good Food For Bots
These are just a few ways you can use the RSS Feed widget built into Wordpress Widgets. If you want to see some of these widgets in use check out For No REal Reason I’ve got several of them running on that site including a hashtag widget.
Early this morning, I took the Lab up to Wordpress 2.2. I did the 5 step process as recommended.
- Backup all the files
- Deactivate all the plug-ins
- Install the new files overwriting the old ones
- Run upgrade.php
- Re-activate the plug-ins
I will say this upgrade has been the one causing the least issues of any major upgrade I’ve done. The last one was a disaster from the sense it changed all the permalinks and made the pages disappear from the search engines if not fixed quickly you would have bots crawling and not finding and then finding under a new name and address. This upgrade didn’t go there thankfully.
Gottcha’s so far
Widgets
This new version has built in support for widgets, so you won’t need to or be able to activate the sidebar widget. Don’t stress over it. When you go the presentation tab it now has the word widget for the link.
MyBlogLog Plug-in
If you have the mybloglog plugin installed, you will need to add it to the sidebar again even if it was there before, it is now down in the options to add section.
Remember you will have to modify the code or it will produce W3C errors. I think this is more a wordpress issue, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t fix the code every time you save the widget settings it reverts back and produces the errors.
Spell checker
The spell checker (at least for me) with both IE 6 and FF just hangs. Once I got a message about ajax something or other. I hope they fix this soon, I like the spell checker feature. You can recover from it by clicking on the save or save and continue you won’t loose anything, it is just scary seeing it hang up with a ghostly pale screen.
New Stuff So Far
Preview
The only new thing I’ve noticed besides the built in widget support and something called “lots of ajax” is the preview window is now full screen and the link is at the top of the edit window. You now get a full WYSIWYG preview which is nice for those wanting the format to be just right when published. No hanging words around images, etc.
The blog seems to load faster, but maybe that is just wishful thinking.
I’m sure there will be more things appear in the next couple of days. I’m going to go ahead and upgrade the Oro Valley Real Estate blog, but wait a little while longer on the Tucson Real Estate in The News.
If you run into anything that other might want to know, please leave a comment.
Running a Wordpress upgrade is always a hold your breath experience. Going to a new (dot) is even more so.
If you are just noticing your avatars are missing from your comments, it isn’t related to the upgrade. Read MyAvatars are Missing!
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.Yeah Right !
