geeked.

I spent a retarded amount of time trying to get a sideblog going on this blog (success finally visible in the leftmost sidebar). I had high hopes for Kates Gasis’s Sideblog Plugin for Wordpress — after an annoying amount of tweaking I got it to work, however there was a deal breaker in that there was no way to keep sideblog posts out of the “recent entries” list (Dear Matt: why isn’t there an easy way to exclude one or several categories from the recent entries function?).

I felt that installing an entire different blog just to make a sideblog is really overkill, but it seemed like the best choice. I got lazy and decided not to deal with a new Wordpress install on my own server, and had some curiosity about checking out Wordpress.com again after having looked at it only briefly after it launched — plus, I’ve also been too lazy to upgrade this blog to WP 2.0 and wanted to see the latest version in action. So, I set up a new blog there and posted a few sideblog entries. Then, I went over to Feeddigest which, afaik, is still the best way to syndicate an RSS feed on your blog short of rolling your own setup with Magpie RSS.

However, I had a new problem. Wordpress.com injects extraneous <p> tags around the post body in its RSS feed! WTF?! This made it incredibly difficult and annoying to get the presentation to line up the way I wanted it to. I made a half-hearted attempt to spelunk through the Wordpress codex and FAQ to see if I could get rid of the tags, but honestly by this time I was all troubleshooted out (and really sick of the Wordpress codex after my previous efforts with the Sideblog plugin). So I gave up and started a new Blogger blog, being curious to check out the recent updates over there. Thankfully, no maddening extra <p> tags. Behold, the sideblog.

But you know, it occurs to me to complain about the difficulty of publishing an RSS feed on your blog/website/wiki. Feeddigest is great, for sure — but new signups are currently disabled. Plus, the displayed feed isn’t actually in real-time — it’s only polled every half hour. I’ve also had difficulty getting the “recent comments” feed (filtered through Feeddigest) to *stop* displaying spam comments I’ve deleted — boy, does that suck. There’s the Feedroll service, but you can’t enter your own RSS feed! You have to choose from a list of feeds they provide. Useless!

Someone needs to make a Really Simply Service that lets you input an RSS feed, adjust the formatting to your taste, and get back a javascript code to embed the feed in your blog. If someone is doing this already, please for the love of god, let me know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 5:02 pm and is filed under coding, blogging tools, technology wish list, remix culture, customer disservice, RSS, tools, web 2.0, user-centric. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.