Fetching RSS Posts from within Wordpress

September 3, 2006 8:52 AM

I'd like to have a list of the most recent entries from several RSS feeds somewhere on my WordPress blog. How can I do this?

For example, if I wanted to have the last post I made to mefi, the last post I made to askmefi, and the last post I made to meta (all of which are available as the first entry in their respective RSS feeds), listed in my WP blog template, how can I fetch them? Is there a plugin?

Additionally, is there a roundup RSS feed of all of the above, together as one feed, somewhere on MeFi, per user (ie. all of my posts, maybe including comments, in one feed)?

posted by armoured-ant to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I use CaRP to do this (yeah, I know, most irritating website ever). It required some mucking about with PHP, but nothing I couldn't do (and I don't know the language). The documentation is fairly thorough.

I'm sure there are better, easier plugins to handle this now, but if you decide to use CaRP and need some help, I'll see what I can do.
posted by danb at 8:59 AM on September 3, 2006

Best answer: I use MagpieRSS to do this sort of stuff - again, you can get it working with no real knowledge of PHP, and since it's independent of WordPress, you don't have to worry about plugins breaking when you upgrade.

Staying inside WordPress, assuming you can use Widgets, it looks like the King RSS widget is your best bet (though I've not tried it myself).

There's tons of straight plugins too, like getRSS, RSSImport, &c. - most only pull in one feed, though, so you'd need to use, say, FeedShake to combine together the various MeFi feeds you want to display into one first.
posted by jack_mo at 9:29 AM on September 3, 2006

Best answer: Additionally, is there a roundup RSS feed of all of the above, together as one feed

Nope. You can go to the FAQ to get a list of the feeds on MeFi but there isn't an aggregated feed though you could use something like suprglu to hack something like this up.
posted by jessamyn at 9:31 AM on September 3, 2006

Oh, and to answer the additional question: I don't think so (shame, it would be handy to have). But as I say, if you just grab all the feeds on your user page and dump them into FeedShake, you can get yourself a MetaFilter personal mega-feed.
posted by jack_mo at 9:34 AM on September 3, 2006

Oop, should've previewed - suprglu is maybe better than FeedShake for making your roundup feed, as you'll get a weblog-style page along with the feed, and it's much easier to add and delete feeds.
posted by jack_mo at 9:40 AM on September 3, 2006

Best answer: i don't know wordpress very well, but if lets you display simple javascript, you can use Feed2JS. i've used it to display rss feeds on web sites--it's very simple to use (fill out the form with the feed URL, # of posts to display and a couple other things, then click a button and it gives you the js code to insert in your page).

I've had a few feeds that didn't cooperate, but overall, it's a great tool for quickly inserting feeds into a web site without any PHP fiddling.
posted by jessicak at 9:50 AM on September 3, 2006

Response by poster: Hah. I know Zach, who made getRSS, personally. The internets are tiny!

Think I'll use suprglu to plug together a combined feed, then getRSS or Feed2JS to fetch it.

Thanks Fites!
posted by armoured-ant at 1:58 PM on September 3, 2006