As noted previously, I’ve been trying to find a way to fold a snapshot of an RSS feed — in this case my Google Reader shared items — into a daily blog post. I did this a while back as a manual process, but … well, it was a manual process, therefore labor-intensive and hit-and-miss.
I finally found what I was looking for here: EconTech » Connecting Google Reader and WordPress: Digest Mode aka Daily Links ala Delicious. The author started with the Digest Post plug-in, and tweaked it so that it, well, worked with the current versions of WP. Part of that tweaking was actually changing the Google Reader Atom feed into RSS (which WP handles correctly*) by running it through Feedburner (turn off “Browser Friendly” and “Smart Feed” and turn on “Convert Format” to RSS 2.0). The enhanced version of the plug-in ostensibly gives the source of the feed (it doesn’t) and the notes posted with the GReader feed (it does).
The author notes the enhanced plug-in works through WP 2.5; I’m running it successfully on 2.7.1.
There’s also an updated version that works in PHP 5 (vs PHP 4, which is what my host’s server is currently on).
I’ve tweaked the labeled tweakable portions of the plug-in. I’ve also changed the format of the datestamp in the title (in the “Post supplied data” section, changing the %x to a better strftime format.
The plug-in works once per day, based on the time provided. Note, as the plug-in comment does, that the time identified is not the blog’s time, but the server’s time — which means you need to know where your server is actually situated (or else do some day-long tests to see when it fires off).
At any rate — huzzah, it works! Which means that for those in the studio audience who don’t hang out in Google Reader, the stuff I flag to share will be easily (and in a static fashion) available here without my having to do anything. Now that’s convenience.
(Currently I’m looking at having the links auto-post at 8 p.m. daily. We’ll see.)
* It is possible that earlier failures with the original Digest Post or Indigestion plug-ins was due to not routing through a properly-configured Feedburner RSS feed.
Okay, had some anomolous behavior today.
1. At 4:01p, the plug-in fired … which wasn’t the right time. And it only grabbed one feed item, the same item that was the first item chosen yesterday, which isn’t right.
2. At 6:20p, the plug-in fired again, bringing in four new items — but that’s not everything that should have been pending. That’s not the full content of the feed coming from Feedburner.
The plug-in is supposed to fire off at 22:00. The plug-in says that’s the server time. My notes from yesterday is that it’s MDT+2, which would be EDT, which is correct. Why it fired off at 18:20, four hours early, I’ve no idea.
I note that yesterday it pulled in five entries.
Weird. And annoying.
And at 10:36 pm, I got another set of 4 more items (which were, in fact, subsequent to the previous post’s. At the time, I believe the plug-in was set to 20:00. Interestingly, the datestamp in the *title* is the next day.
*sigh*
So this afternoon, at 4 pm (1600), it updated (scheduled at 2000) with 11 Shared Items … but missing 2 items since the last Unblogged Bits post.
I am so confused.
Seems to be working for Doyce, though.
And, again, without my touching it, another post at 10:35p (again, still set at 20:00).
Six posts this time, sequential from the perious Unblogged Bits, but ignoring the ones flagged “Shared by You” … which would seem meaningful, except the previous batch had some that were flagged the same way.
Grr. Tech Support Man gets irked when there’s no discernable pattern to misbehavior!
Hrm.
Multiple posts of the same stuff. 4:01p, 6:00p. 6:21p. 7:06p. 7:06p (again). 8:00p. 8:15p. 8:46p. 8:47p. 8:48p. 8:48p. 9:15p. 9:26p. 9:55p. 10:36p (though this last one excluded the coments but included Atom-like title weirdness).
Rrrg.
Will deactivate and reactivate to see if that works.
Rrg. And hrm.
This continues to work in fits and starts — today it ran around the right time, but included some posts from yesterday.
I continue to get multiple versions of the posting, though they’re all about at the same time, and with complete records of the shared items.
Hrm.