Textpattern Article & Link Feed
Posted 25 July 2007 under feeds, site, technology, textpattern
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been struggling to combine the articles and links from this site into a unified feed. I thought I’d found a solution using FeedBlendr to combine the two feeds, but upon further investigation, I noticed it filling in the author and website fields with its own information. It seems like FeedBlendr is more intended to create feeds for personal consumption rather than for publishing purposes, which is fine, but not really what I’m going for. I spent some time with Yahoo! Pipes, which is totally sweet, but still insists upon adding its own site link and favicon to the feed. In the end, I decided the only way I would get the feed I wanted was to make it myself.
Using SimplePie, this was actually way easier than I expected — most of the difficulty was in figuring out the subtleties of the Atom format. I created a directory off my document root called feed, and in it put two subdirectories, lib and cache. I installed the SimplePie library in the lib directory, and then wrote this script (rename to index.php to get the clean URL).
Viola! A custom feed of articles and links available at https://v1.davideisinger.com/feed, which I can pipe through FeedBurner for the stats tracking that I crave. If you’d like to try your hand at creating your own feeds, here are some good starting points:
Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.