I’ve completely redone the Paddling Planet site.
The site was originally built with some software called planetplanet, but nobody maintained it any more. I found a replacement, but it wasn’t much better.
A nagging email from Google about the need to update analytics tags promoted me to rethink.
I never have to worry about such things with my WordPress sites. The plug-ins update automatically, and so do tags, metadata, schemes and whatever else is happening behind the scenes of a web site.
I decided to convert the site to WordPress.
There are some plug-ins available for RSS aggregators, but many were overkill and in all cases I would need a premium version to do there site properly.
In the end I rolled my own.
A home-made plug-in manages the links (using the hidden links manager in WordPress), retrieves the feeds regularly, parses them and inserts the information in blog posts. Any featured image is downloaded and added to the post.
All this happens entirely within WordPress. There are no external programs or cron jobs involved.
A (very) slightly modified standard theme handles the display, but just about any theme should be easily adaptable.
The aggregated RSS and Atom feeds are there, courtesy of WordPress.
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