• HART-Empire Network Wide RSS Feeds Now Available

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    November 21st, 2006HARTHART-Empire Network

    Our RSS Feed is now available by Channel

    For this HART-Empire.com (HART-Empire Network) site .. you are now able to grab an RSS Feed for all our sites in one easy feed .. or by channel. The feeds follow the sections found on our network code in all of our sidebars.

    * HART-Empire Network II – (All Blogs In Our Network)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Pet Related Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Entertainment Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Shopping Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Opinionated Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Small Business & Finance Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Sports Related Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Health & Fitness Blogs)
    * HART-Empire Network II – (Personal & Security Blogs)

    I have included the above links in all the sites .. being the RSS Feed URL and the actual URL of the site. In all cases, if you prefer to receive one daily update of all posts in our network or by channel .. the option to subscribe via email is also provided in the sidebars above.

    HART-Empire Network II – How I Created Each Site

    I have created a secondary site .. HART-Network.com (HART-Empire Network II) and each site is a separate and unique blog created specifically for this purpose. I created the first site in the root and setup MySQL database options in the wp-config.php file. After it was created, I just copied the entire root and subfolders into a NEW folder on my local hard drive, and then uploaded into unique sub-folders for each channel. I would change the tables in the config file only before creating the new blog. For instance, the default wp-config-sample.php suggests tables of “wp_” but, I use tables that identifies the blog. I might use “network_” and “pets_” and “shop_” (etc etc) as the tables.

    I should note that I am using the WordPress Default 1.6 by Michael Heilemann as the THEME for each blog for a reason. It has widget support .. and you can easily modify the header colors and shading and font. I should mention, that if you come regularly to any of these sites .. I will be changing the colors often just for the heck of it! Here’s how the screen option looks.

    When I first create a new site, during the 5-minute install .. I would play with the header and then fix the options the way I like. More on that in the next section.

    This Is How I Created Each New Blog

    * I copy all the files into the appropriate directory
    * I set the wp-config.php variables accordingly
    * I do the famous 5-minute install
    * I login with the password provided, go to USER and fill in my details, and turn off the rich editor.
    * I go to PLUGINS and activate the ones that I want ..
    * I modify OPTIONS similar to the way I prefer them – in all my blogs (I like to have another one in an open tab)
    * I create a new feedburner feed for the blog (see below – I did it this time in conjunction with setting up my widgets)
    * I decided to add google adsense link unit under each header, and the links above for each sites’ URL and RSS Feed
    * I decided to not include all of the syndication buttons that I normally have in my sidebars (like on this blog)

    All in all, the first one took me about 30 minutes, but each subsequent one took 10 minutes to do the above process. When it came time for the last item (adsens and links) I did all of the sites with the same code to make things simpler and faster using copy/paste and it sure speeded things up.

    Why and How Am I Using Widgets

    Yes .. there is such a thing called widgets … in wordpress – you need two things:

    * The Sidebar Widgets Plugin
    * A WordPress theme that can utilize widgets in the sidebar

    Basically, if you have a theme – you can do whatever you want with it and your sidebar – even if you activate the widget plugin. But, once you start playing with it .. the widgets takes over and your sidebar is organized the way you want. You just grab and drop a widget box in the order you want. And, you can create many text widgets and RSS widgets as you like. A “Text Widget” is basically a section block that you can insert anything into it. It uses the heading CSS just like any other heading (Archives, Meta, Etc) and it’s obvious pretty flexible. The RSS Widget is a great way to bring some other RSS Feed headlines into your sidebar. For all of the sites .. I have standardized the widgets so the RSS widget includes the main 100% feed of all sites – but only the last 10 headlines. Check it out. And, you can see the order of widgets each of my blogs now have – based on the following image:

    * In TEXT 1 – I am using the feedburner codes for (1) large RSS button, (2) Feedburner count and (3) Email subscription option
    * In TEXT 2 – I left blank for the heck of it – for now
    * In RSS 1 – I just include the RSS feed of the HART-Network.com site and added a description
    * In TEXT 3 – I have just copied the standard Network Stuff that all sites have in our sidebars.

    And .. How Am I Getting All of These Feeds?

    If you are an owner of a little network of blogs yourself .. I highly recommend this technique. Although, it is quite a dangerous plugin – if you ask me .. because people can literally steal your feed .. and place it on their blog. The way that I am doing things, is that if you click on the title of any post that is retrieved, you will jump to the original post on the original blog that it was written. However, you can set your options to leave the permalink as part of the same blog, instead of the source blog.

    If you are using this feature – PLEASE! GET PERMISSION FIRST! Don’t be a dooty!~ or whatever they are calling those who steal feeds and earn money from that… // But – to me, internet is about sharing so this is how I did it:

    * FeedWordPress Plugin – just like any other plugin .. you copy the files into your plugin folder, and activate it
    * There is an update-feeds.php file which must go into your wp-content folder
    * You modify the options in the OPTIONS section
    * You add RSS Feeds under a new option in the LINKS section
    * I setup a cron job directly through my cPanel of my host server to run the update-feeds file every fixed period of time.

    And that’s it! Neat, huh?

    If anybody needs more detailed questions answered .. feel free to ask in the comments. In the meantime .. if you are a subscriber to the HART-Empire Network Blog (HART-Empire.com) or the 62-151 Media Group Blog (62-151.com) .. I have added those RSS Feeds to be included in the SMALL BUSINESS & FINANCE CHANNEL feeds.

    Enjoy~

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3 responses to “HART-Empire Network Wide RSS Feeds Now Available” RSS icon

  • Problem with RSS Feed in WordPress.
    I have a subdomain that I installed wordpress for another blog site, but the subdomain site's rss feed points to my parent site.
    Can anyone come up with any suggestions?

  • Sorry .. this was lost in moderation queue ..

    Anthony (if reading this) .. I had a recent problem myself. What was happening is that the .htaccess wasn’t chmod properly to permissions 666. The site had problems from the start for some reason, being that the initial .htaccess always had zero bytes and was empty and would never be updated by the permalink structure in options – none of my permalinks worked.

    I finally got fed up and just copied a similar blog’s .htaccess in there and the permalinks worked. I didn’t notice that I forgot to give the new file proper permissions until I clicked on the RSS button on IE7 and got transported to URL of the other site. I just chmod the new file, re-updated the permalink structure inside wordpress – and it works fine now.

  • Its not my first time to pay a visit this web page, i
    am browsing this website dailly and get nice information from here everyday.


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