![\"clownmommy](\"http:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-content\/uploads\/public\/blogimages\/clown-mommy-screenshot.png\" "\\"clownmommy")
It’s surprising how hard it is to subscribe to sites intent on driving traffic to their main page, particularly if you want a subset of content by author or topic.<\/p>\nIt’s surprising how hard it is to subscribe to sites intent on driving traffic to their main page, particularly if you want a subset of content by author or topic.<\/p>\n
My wife writes for the nycmoms blog<\/span>. She wanted to show a list of her recent blogs on her personal blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nycmoms exposes a single feed aggregating recent posts across all authors.<\/p>\n Create a feed<\/strong><\/p>\n My first iteration was to filter this feed through Yahoo Pipes<\/a>. Pipes provides a graphical interface for chaining rules for manipulating web content and exposing it in a feed.<\/p>\n I used the “fetch feed” module pointed to the recent posts feed, connected it to the filter module set to only permit items where the author.name contained my wife’s handle. <\/p>\n This produced a correct result. However, only one or two of my wife’s posts are in the “recent posts” feed at any given time.<\/p>\n For the next iteration I found an alternative source outside the blog itself. Being a Yahoo tool, pipes provides a Yahoo search module. So, I searched for the phrase “Posted by KathieH” restricted to the site, nycmomsblog.com. <\/p>\n This produced more but less precise results. It includes additional pages such as my wife’s bio and sorted by relevance not post date.<\/p>\n I used the sort module on the item.updatedon field in the rss feed.<\/p>\n Next I used the filter module to exclude anything that was not an actual post identified by the term: “NYC Moms: KathieH” and piped out to rss<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then I used the RSS widget in wordpress to expose this feed on my wife’s blog. Done!<\/p>\n Consume the feed<\/strong><\/p>\n Except, my wife’s blog began suffering from the dreaded “Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size” error in the simplepie library used by the RSS widget.<\/p>\n Well documented on the web<\/a>, this is caused by my service provider’s decision to restrict accounts to 32MB of memory for PHP script execution. This and the 50MB-200MB storage limits were reasonable when I first signed up with my ISP ten years ago but is about as appropriate as using a 80286 processor now.<\/p>\n I decided to switch from server side processing to client side.<\/p>\n Luckily, Yahoo Pipes exposes feeds in the JSONP format. JSON is easily parsed by Javascript in the browser. JSONP is an established workaround (i.e. hack)<\/a> that allows the client to make requests to third party URL’s without triggering the cross site security restrictions built into current browsers. It simply wraps the data response in a prefix that the browser parses as a function (allowed) as opposed to pure data (not allowed).<\/p>\n WordPress already uses the jQuery library which is well documented by examples<\/a> on how to request, parse and render a feed.<\/p>\n I used the getJSON function to retrieve and parse the feed. It is exposed as a nested array containing at the top level, key\/value pairs associated with the entire feed and an array of items containing the actual posts.<\/p>\n I loop through the value.items format them into HTML and append them into a div with the id nycmoms_posts. Probably overkill given how fast this all works but I display a loading indicator which I fade out when the loop is complete (from Kyle Meyer<\/a>).<\/p>\n <div id=”nycmoms”> <style> var descriptionPattern = \/^(.*) … Posted by Kathie H. on (\\w+) (\\d+), (\\d+) .*$\/g<\/p>\n window.onload = function() {<\/p>\n jQuery.getJSON(“http:\/\/pipes.yahoo.com\/pipes\/pipe.run?_id=8a8edd5b1e5181a001892cee910c11fc&_render=json&_callback=?”, }<\/p>\n function formatDescription(description) <\/script>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s surprising how hard it is to subscribe to sites intent on driving traffic to their main page, particularly if you want a subset of content by author or topic. My wife writes for the nycmoms blog. She wanted to … Continue reading ![\"Yahoo](\"http:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-content\/uploads\/public\/blogimages\/yahoo-pipes-screen-shot.png\" "\\"Yahoo")
<\/p>\n\n
<h2>Kathie on <a href=”http:\/\/www.nycmomsblog.com\/kathieh\/”>nycmomsblog.com<\/a><\/h2>
<div id=”nycmoms_loading” >…<\/div>
<ul id=”nycmoms_posts” \/>
<\/div><\/p>\n
#nycmoms { width:250px;min-height:125px;}
#nycmoms_loading { position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100px;padding:100px 0 0 125px;}
#nycmoms .description, #nycmoms .postdate { font-size:small;}
<\/style>
<script src=”wp-includes\/js\/jquery\/jquery.js?ver=1.3.2″><\/script>
<script><\/p>\n
function(data) {
jQuery.each(data.value.items, function(i, post) {
jQuery(“#nycmoms_posts”).append(
‘<li><a href=”‘ + post.link +'”>’ + formatTitle(post.title) + “<\/a>”
+ “<!– “+formatDescription(post.description)+”–>”
+ “<\/li>”
) , jQuery(‘#nycmoms_loading’).fadeOut(500);
});
});<\/p>\n
{
return description.replace(descriptionPattern, ‘<span=”description>”$1 … <\/span><span id=”postdate”>posted $2 $3, $4<\/span>’);
}
function formatTitle(title)
{
return title.replace(\/^NYC Moms: \/, ”);
}<\/p>\n