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Re-using Web Content From One Site on Another

I blog professionally at a site called SemiWiki.com along with several other bloggers, and we write about the semiconductor world plus the software tools used to design semiconductors called Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

The new blogs on the front page of SemiWiki would work great on my marketing consulting site, MarketingEDA.com but in abbreviated form.

So how did I re-use the web content from SemiWiki on my site MarketingEDA?

This re-use is accomplished through a web standard known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If you look at that screenshot from SemiWiki there’s a little orange icon for RSS: 

By clicking on that icon I can retrieve the RSS address which contains all the info that I want to re-use.

http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/external.php?do=rss&type=newcontent&sectionid=1&days=120&count=10

If you view that RSS feed in a reader it will show something like this:

The marketing site is built with WordPress, so I searched for a plugin that would read this RSS feed from SemiWiki and then display it on my Marketing site. Within a few minutes I found and installed a plugin called RSSinPage. In WordPress I edited my Home page and added the short code to re-use this RSS feed:

[rssinpage rssfeed="http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/external.php?do=rss&type=newcontent&sectionid=1&days=120&count=10"]

This RSS plugin worked great and I just needed to make the output more compact by adding a few settings to make the Title appear first, then the date and no description:

[rssinpage rssfeed="http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/external.php?do=rss&type=newcontent&sectionid=1&days=120&count=10" 
rssdescription="no" 
rssitems='10' 
rssformat='Y  x' 
rssdateformat='M j, Y' 
rsstarget="_blank"]

Here’s what each plugin option does:

  • rssfeed – The RSS address from the site I want to re-use content from
  • rssdescription – I didn’t want to include the description, so this ignores it
  • rssitems – The 10 most recent blog titles will be shown
  • rssformat – Y is the blog post Title with a link, and ‘x’ is the date
  • rssdateformat – American date like: Sep. 26, 2012
  • rsstarget – Clicking the link opens a new tab in your web browser

Summary

If you have a WordPress site then it’s quick and easy to re-use content from other web sites that support the RSS standard.

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