After two days of coding, testing, and pulling my hair out, I am proud to announce the release of Own the Feed, my newest Wordpress plugin. Have you ever gazed at the Wordpress Dashboard’s default RSS feed and wished you could replace it with something better? Now you can, quickly and easily.
The idea was first presented to me by David of BloggingPro. He had just reviewed my first plugin, The Nine Rules, and mused that it would be awesome if there were a plugin available to bring 9rules member content into the Dashboard. Always eager to meet a challenge, I quickly got to work. Once I had done some research, however, a thought occurred to me. Why limit ourselves to 9rules content? Why not allow the user to define any feed they wish? It is their Dashboard, after all.
Most of my time was spent planning and researching — trying to figure out if the plugin would even be possible. Much of the coding was completed over the course of the day, with the first beta going out to testers sometime around 5:00pm. The final beta version was posted and tested around 2:00am. My eternal thanks and gratitude go out to the regulars in the 9rules IRC channel. Without their help and support in testing Own the Feed, the plugin would have never seen the light of day. Cheers guys. I also need to thank the crew responsible for Dasher for giving me plenty of inspiration and for excellent code to learn from.
Hopefully, this will just be the beginning. I already have ideas for improvements and additional features I’d like to see included in the plugin, including the ability to use multiple feeds, so expect another release sometime in the future. I don’t claim to be very skilled at creating plugins, but I am always willing to learn. If anyone spots something in the code that can be improved upon or changed, feel free to let me know about it.
So, what are you waiting for? Go check the plugin out at the Downloads page! As always, leave any comments, support questions, or critiques as comments on this entry. Alternatively, you can contact me directly through e-mail. And be sure to let me know if you are using the plugin!
Update (5:02am): I’m already fixing bugs! A bug in which the feed would disappear if you visited the “Dashboard” feed sub-menu, but navigated away without entering anything, has been squashed. A new version has been uploaded. If you are one of the few who has downloaded the plugin already, please use the new updated version.
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This is am amazing plugin and I can’t wait to see what else is in store. Amazing job.
Thanks Jess! After two days of Own the Feed taking over my life, it’s good to put it out there for people to use. As always, if you guys spot anything that can be improved, don’t be afraid to let me know!
Your re-design REALLY reminds me of my site design. And for that, I just wanted to tell toy that you have superb design tastes and skills!
I can certainly see the similarities, jackosh! Congratulations on having good taste as well.
Nice site.
Does 9rules put out an xml/rss feed from all its member sites combined into one for me to load into this plugin?
As far as I’ve been able to tell, not at this time. You can subscribe to a feed from a specific community by adding ‘feed’ to the end of the url (i.e. http://www.9rules.com/en/browse/design/feed/), however those feeds seem to have stopped updating sometime around the beginning of August. Beyond that, you can always subscribe to the 9rules blog here.
I’m going to do a bit more searching around the site and try asking in the IRC channel. Perhaps there’s something I’ve overlooked.
Update (7:33pm): If you don’t mind importing an OPML file into your desktop or online feedreader, you can head here and grab every member’s feed at once.
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