I'm working on a personal website (http://www.beforethecubicle.com/, critiques welcome) and was wondering if I should use feedsweep. Feedsweep is a kind of customizable javascript widget that will pull posts from an rss feed and embed them on your site. In my case, I'm using it to put a summary of my latest blog post on my home page. I wanted to do this because it's conveniently automated so I basically never have to make a change to my homepage. The downside is that, since it's a javascript, search engines don't pick up the words I use in the blogpost. Similarly, my blog page pulls all of my posts from blogspot, so none of the words are picked up by search engines there either. Do you think it's worth the extra time to copy the text into the page instead of using feedsweep so that I have that searchable content on the page?
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to feedsweep or not to feedsweep?
- Thread starter kevindosi
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Well, I think you hit on the pros and cons pretty well there. Another option is to use a PHP script to do the pulling for you (assuming your server supports PHP, but another language would work as well). Though I don't know one off hand, I'm 100% sure someone else has written a script to do exactly what you need. This is a very common piece of functionality that people want to integrate onto their site.
If it was me I'd just write something myself, but I'm a developer so that's me. The script can either pull info from the RSS or from your database where the blog is stored. One that interfaces with RSS would likely take less configuration since it's in a standard format.
If it was me I'd just write something myself, but I'm a developer so that's me. The script can either pull info from the RSS or from your database where the blog is stored. One that interfaces with RSS would likely take less configuration since it's in a standard format.
Hmmm... yeah, it's a good point. If I'm not at my computer, though, I can just send an email to blogspot and it'll be posted. Without some sort of script, I'd have to go change the home page later and it wouldn't be immediate.
I think I'll switch to writing it in manually and, if it's too much of a hassle, I'll just switch back to feedsweep.
I think I'll switch to writing it in manually and, if it's too much of a hassle, I'll just switch back to feedsweep.
I used PHP to syndicate some RSS stuff on my website a few years ago and it's been working great.
Make sure you run it on a cron job though, instead of having the PHP pull RSS from the servers "live" as the user requests the page. Doing it live with PHP OR Javascript will make your web page's reliability and load time depend upon the other peoples' servers if you don't cron it and store the results "locally" on your server.
Make sure you run it on a cron job though, instead of having the PHP pull RSS from the servers "live" as the user requests the page. Doing it live with PHP OR Javascript will make your web page's reliability and load time depend upon the other peoples' servers if you don't cron it and store the results "locally" on your server.
Have you considered moving your blog to your own server space and using WordPress to integrate everything under one admin?