Wordpress Blog | Real Estate Blog Lab

The RSS Wigdet Under Utilized

By Dave Smith Saturday September 27, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

Have You Tried Google Chrome

By Dave Smith Friday September 5, 2008

I’m wondering how many of you have downloaded and tried using Google Chrome to write, edit and maintain your WordPress blog.

This is my first attempt to do so. I’m finding it to be an interesting experience to say the least. It keeps wanting to put extra spaces between my paragraph breaks especially if I switch between HTML and Visual.

When I opened the editor to write a new post, I entered the title then down to the body of the post. I wrote a word and when I backspaced over the word and one more backspace it took me to the Dashboard, not the top line of the editor. I tried it several times and it repeated this action each time. ”Don’t do it”

I’ve also noticed this browser seems to learn. One time it will not know what to do, but the next time it will do it even to the point of saying some URL’s are not available, but later it will open them.

I’ve also noticed that making options changes might require you to close the browser completely and re open to see the changes take effect.

The first time I tried to write a post in Chrome I clicked on the link button and it wouldn’t allow the pop up window to appear so I could enter the link. However, later it worked fine.

It is stripped down, No bells, no whistles, and even the Google things you might expect incorporated are not available like the Google Toolbar or Google Gears. I’ve done a couple of saves and it seems a little faster than FF with Google Gears or Flock without Gears.

Preview a post can be a wild trip at times. I’ll let you see what it does for yourself. Maybe nothing, maybe . . .

I know I was going to watch Dirty Harry and call it a night, but I had 20 minutes to wait so thought I’d take Chrome for another quick spin around the blog.

Has anyone put this browser through the WordPress meatgrinder? Or was that were weekend GEEK project?

Gotta Go time for the Dead Pool.