Whew! I’m done moving my old articles to WordPress! Like I said, all of the old comments are just added to the bottom of each article. For new articles going forward, comments added will show up nicer.
I decided to go for WordPress. I’m in the process of bringing all my old articles over from the old site. I’m just copying and pasting the content, specifying the orginial date of the article, and displaying any comments I received on those articles at the end of the article. I’m also tagging the old articles as I did before. It’s kind of a pain, but I’ve only got about 25 or so articles left to go. So far I’ve been able to do everything I needed, and this will make blogging a bit slicker in the future.
Today I’m in the process of moving my website to a different host. I am also playing around with WordPress, so I may or may not convert to that. It was a great experience writing my own blog from scratch. I worked out lots of fun features, like articles, comments, tag cloud, archives, and RSS feeds. I even came up with multi-user capabilities, so my brother and cousins can have their own blogs on MrAndMrsKraus.com, with the ability to set their own settings and customize the look of their blog. WordPress offers so many plug-ins though, and additional features. Plus it’s supported by a huge community and is constantly improving. Taking all that into account, and keeping in mind that I may be seeing a lot more of WordPress at work, learning the ins and outs of WordPress is appealing.
One thing that has really intrigued me lately is RSS feeds. I knew it wouldn’t be that difficult to figure them out, but I just hadn’t taken the time to research it until last week. Aaron and I set out to learn the details of this increasingly popular aspect of the web.
What it comes down to is that they are very basic. If you have a website with multiple articles in a blog or multiple news stories, then you can easily create an RSS XML file. RSS files are made up of items. Each item must have three things: a title, a link and a description. The title is the name of the article. The link is the link to the full story located on your site. And the description is the text you want to show up from the article.
I discovered there are basically two ways to go about the description. You can be really nice and provide the entire article, even including images and links. Or you can simply provide the first few hundred characters as a sort of teaser. This way if someone who subscribes to your RSS feed is interested by the beginning of your newest article, they will click the link (Ah ha! Remember one of the three parts of an item is the link) that takes them to the full story. This is not a bad idea if you are trying to bring more traffic to your site. And who isn’t?
So while I feel privileged when the feeds I subscribe to provide the entire article, thus allowing me the ability to never leave Google Reader, I completely understand when a majority of them only provide a teaser.
If you are interested in learning more about the structure of an RSS file, just look at mine! It is located at http://www.mrandmrskraus.com/rss.xml
One thing worth noting. Not only does each item have a title, link and description, but these are also provided at the top of the RSS file in order to specify the main title, main website URL, and main description of your website.
Well, I will be excited if you all subscribe to my RSS feed now. The link to it is signified by the little orange icon on my main page. Happy reading!