pantsonhead

<p>I don’t really like Blogrolls, I think they’re often not much more than glorified link dumps. I don’t like how they give you nothing more than the Blog title, and unless that title really grabs your attention, you’re never gonna click it. I don’t like how they are often just a static list, commonly out of date, that you learn to ignore after the first 4 page views. In their current format, they just appear to be a great waste of space.</p>
<p>This is why I decided to create the RSS Blogroll plugin. RSS Blogroll allows you to link to your favourite blogs via the latest items from their RSS/Atom feed. Article titles are much more attention grabbing and will deliver much higher quality traffic. We all hate clicking through to abandoned blogs – displaying article publication dates also lets readers know these are up to date and active sites.</p>
<p>Many of us want to direct some of our traffic to related sites. RSS Blogroll will create deeplinks to the target sites, which are much more useful for SEO than homepage links. Overall it’s a win-win situation with a better browsing experience for users and the linked sites getting more visitors who are actually interested in their content.</p>


RSS Blogroll

Sidebar widget that links to recent entries from RSS/Atom feeds.

Workshopshed

<p>The RSS Feed checker looks through your blogroll for links with rss feeds and then stores the name and url of the latest article.<br />
The Links RSS Enhanced widget then displays the latest links in descending order.<br />
The idea for the widget comes from the blogroll widget on blogger.</p>
<h3>Technical section</h3>
<p>The plugin will create an extra table in your wordpress database to store the latest feed updates,<br />
this will be called links_rss with the prefix for your database e.g. wp_links_rss</p>
<p>A Cron (schedule) is created to run every 30 minutes and process links. Note that Cron in WordPress<br />
depends on hits, your WordPress website receives. So playing with this plugin within an offline<br />
environment (MAMP, XAMPP, WAMP etc.) without anyone or anything triggering the scheduling by<br />
sending requests to the WordPress page won’t produce any results if you do not trigger it by<br />
yourself.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p>A selection of places I’ve found help for this plugin.</p>
<p>Thanks also to Ozh, Roland Rust and for their explainations and examples</p>
<h4>Admin UI</h4>
<ul>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_meta_box</li>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Menus#Page_Hook_Suffix</li>
<li>http://wpengineer.com/1295/meta-links-for-wordpress-plugins/</li>
<li>http://www.code-styling.de/english/how-to-use-wordpress-metaboxes-at-own-plugins</li>
<li>http://planetozh.com/blog/2008/02/wordpress-snippet-add_meta_box/</li>
<li>http://wptheming.com/2011/08/admin-notices-in-wordpress/</li>
<li>http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/improving-security-in-wordpress-plugins-using-nonces</li>
</ul>
<h4>Ajax</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://return-true.com/2010/01/using-ajax-in-your-wordpress-theme-admin/</li>
<li>http://amiworks.co.in/talk/simplified-ajax-for-wordpress-plugin-developers-using-jquery/</li>
<li>http://xplus3.net/2008/10/16/jquery-and-ajax-in-wordpress-plugins-administration-pages/</li>
<li>http://www.garyc40.com/2010/03/5-tips-for-using-ajax-in-wordpress/</li>
</ul>
<h4>Database</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://createmy.com.au/connecting-your-plugin-to-the-wordpress-database/</li>
<li>http://webjawns.com/2009/08/the-wordpress-wpdb-class-explained/</li>
</ul>
<h4>Scheduling</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://wpseek.com/source/wp/latest/nav.html?wp-includes/cron.php.html</li>
<li>Ideas on background processing from the broken link checker</li>
</ul>
<h4>Settings</h4>
<ul>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_API – new way to handle options/settings         </li>
<li>http://ottopress.com/2009/wordpress-settings-api-tutorial/</li>
<li>http://planetozh.com/blog/2009/05/handling-plugins-options-in-wordpress-28-with-register_setting/</li>
<li>http://wpengineer.com/2139/adding-settings-to-an-existing-page-using-the-settings-api/</li>
<li>http://blog.gneu.org/2010/09/intro-to-the-wordpress-settings-api/</li>
<li>http://alisothegeek.com/2011/01/wordpress-settings-api-tutorial-1/</li>
</ul>
<h4>RSS Feeds</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://jaewon.mine.nu/jaewon/2010/10/30/how-to-make-your-wordpress-a-rss-reader/</li>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime</li>
<li>http://simplepie.org/</li>
</ul>


RSS Feed Checker

The RSS Feed checker looks through your blogroll for links with rss feeds and then stores the name and url of the latest article.

RSS Blogroll vs RSS Feed Checker