Forum

[perswealth]

Hey guys,

Have a question about RSS feeds. Now I don't believe the Affiloblueprint theme has an RSS feed for it. If that is the case, then how would I put an RSS feed on it (Affiloblueprint theme)? I also don't think Mark has it on his "WOWBlackBook" website (but i could be wrong).

I just think that having an RSS feed on your website is important, and I would love to have one on my site, but given that the Affiloblueprint theme doesn't have one, just want to know if there is a way of putting one on it. Thanks everyone

 

[faradina]

An RSS feed would work fine if we have posts instead of pages because wordpress RSS feeds work with posts and comments. Since we work with pages in the Affiloblueprint WordPress Theme, we can't put in an RSS feed. Also, this capability was specifically not included with the theme to minimize distractions for both site owners and visitors.

 

[perswealth]

AHHH, i see. Ok, Thanks, Fara ; )

 

[trevanne]

You can still get an RSS feed.
If you use Firefox, you will see an RSS symbol top right.
If you click on that you will see yourwebsite/feed/

Why couldn't that be fed into Pingomatic or something similar.

Trevor

 

[faradina]

If you have posts, you can certainly feed that into something, but then you will have to put in posts instead of pages. The thing is, if you have posts instead of pages, they will not appear on the sidebar. And if you have both posts and pages with the same content, well, that's duplicate content.

 

[bears34]

I haven't used it, but there is this plugin for adding pages to RSS - http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/blog/?p=423

 

[faradina]

That plugin is certainly worth looking into. I'll test it myself as soon as I get around to it. Thanks for sharing, bears.

 

[perswealth]

Faradinia,

Do come back and tell us your results. I'm interested in adding that myself...

 

[perswealth]

Actually, if i download the plugin, will it show the RSS button on the Affiloblueprint theme, or will i have to do something first to get that RSS button on there, THEN download the plugin?? Just curious...

 

[faradina]

I haven't installed the plug in yet as I am in the process of migrating my test site to another server and there are a lot of things going wrong on both my old and new hosting providers. But I doubt that the plugin will cause the RSS button to appear on the Affiloblueprint theme as this function is disabled, plugin or no plugin.

 

[trevanne]

I have downloaded the plugin.
The only feed I see is from Firefox and when I click on it, I get
"Subscribe to 'website' RSS Feed"

What would I do with that?

Trevor

 

[kieran]

Hi Faradina

I really need to have an RSS feed in my AB Theme pages, and have uploaded the mariosalexandrou plug-in. I note your comment that the RSS button is disabled. Is there any way I can enable it? Can I load HTML into the Sidebar Content (Top) box, or am getting into tricky territory?

 

[faradina]

@kieran
Sorry for the late reply. I had a long weekend.
I did not exactly mean that the button is disabled. I meant that the function is disabled in the AB theme. That's because it was designed to have as few distractions as possible.
What are you wanting to do? Do you want to pull RSS from another site for publication on your pages or give others the option to pull RSS from your site?

 

[faradina]

By the way, everyone, I finally got around to installing the RSS Includes Pages plug in on my test site. I then clicked the RSS Feed button at the end of the address bar of my browser (firefox) and I saw the pages from my test site in the feed list. It does work, but only with firefox in my tests. When I tried to bring up the feed in IE8, it said "Internet Explorer cannot display this feed. This feed contains a DTD (Document Type Definition). DTDs are used to define a structure of a webpage. Internet Explorer does not support DTDs in feeds". Any MSIE experts out there who could shed light on why this is so?

 

[kieran]

Hi Faradina

Thanks for your response. I am trying to set up an RSS button on my web pages so that others can pull RSS from these pages.

I seem to have uploaded the mario alexandrou plugin correctly but there is no RSS button anywhere. I don't seem to have an RSS button even on my Firefox address bar or anywhere else, and I can't seem to find an option for one in any of the ''customise toolbar'' places.

This is driving me nuts, because I feel that the solution is just out of reach! I am probably not asking the right question, so aplogise for wasting everybody's time.

I have tried to ask this question of the Affilorama techies elsewhere in this Forum, so perhaps we'll see what they come up with.

In the meantime many thanks for your efforts to read my mind!

Regards

Kieran

 

[MarkLincoln]

Hi Kieran and Fara,

Sorry to jump in here, and by all means correct me if I'm wrong! But RSS feeds are designed so that someone who has visited your site can be notified of updates in their own RSS feed reader without physically visiting your site each time. They're designed particularly with regularly updated content in mind - i.e. you would subscribe to a blog feed or Twitter feed to get updates of new content into your Outlook RSS reader for example. Or you could have an application on your site that shows an RSS feed from another site to show updated content.

With that in mind, surely RSS feeds are not designed for subscribing to actual web pages as it's considered that those pages will stay pretty much the same for longer periods of time? That's why Fara may be getting an error message for trying to subscribe to webpages rather than posts or updates.

Or have I totally got the wrong end of the stick for what you're trying to do?

Update!: Sorry, just been thinking about it some more! Looking back on sites made using the AB theme, I see what you mean Kieran. Because there's actually no way to add posts in that theme, you're probably adding articles/updates to your site in the form of pages and you want people to be able to subscribe to get those updates right? Yup, I think I understand now! Although the above probably still applies. RSS feeds will still not work so well with pages as they're just not designed for that purpose.

 

[kieran]

Hi Mark

Your assessment is correct about RSS feeds and static web pages, but in our case, we are trying to link with quite a few Web 2.0 sites and our particular niche (computer games) will be updated frequently. Hence the need for RSS, OnlyWire, etc.

It's quite possible that the AB 2.0 WordPress Theme will not be able to provide the kind of site design we need, but I like using it and am anxious not to change to another html editor unless I really have to.

Thanks for your input.

Kieran

 

[faradina]

An update about clicking the RSS Feed button on MSIE 8. Now it's working! I can see the RSS Feed on it now and I see the pages of my test site. Strange that it was not working before. I did not really do anything with my MSIE 8 as I never really use it except for testing.
@kieran, I'm still doing research on making the RSS button appear on the AB theme. I'll post whatever I find, as soon as I find something.

 

[MarkLincoln]

Great stuff.

Coincidentally I just stumbled across this while looking at someone else's blog: http://page2rss.com/

Could be quite useful? Haven't checked it out fully myself yet.

 

[faradina]

Page2RSS is something that you will add to and use with your browser. It could be useful if you want to pull RSS from certain pages but what kieran actually wants is to have an RSS Feed button on his WP site so that others can pull RSS from his site.

 

[faradina]

@kieran
Happiness! At last!
I could not see the forest because of the trees!! I've been so busy looking for complicated, "techie" solutions that I overlooked the simplest and most obvious.
Here's what we need to do:
1. Look for an RSS image that you like through Google image search. Resize or edit it as needed and upload to your hosting server.
2. Insert the RSS image where you need it to be on your site and then put in a link to http://yourdomain.com/feed. If you want it on the top of your sidebar, you can put the code below (modify so it has your actual domain name before "/feed" and the actual URL of the RSS image) in the Sidebar Content (Top) field in Theme Options of the AB Theme.

Code: Select all

<a href="http://yourdomain.com/feed" title="Subscribe to my feed"><img src="http://yourdomain.com/rss.jpg" style="border:0"/></a>

Of course, you still need the RSS Includes Pages plug in so that your pages will show up in the feed.

 

[kieran]

Thank you so much, Faradina. Your support has been great, and now I have a working RSS feed on my website.

What a star!

Regards

Kieran