Last night I spent several hours working on a bit of a code project. The idea was to create a custom RSS feed of posts from Xadara which would import into my Bulletin Board System, Final Zone. It was a solid enough idea, but something I knew, with my relatively amateur coding skills, would be a chore.
Of course I started with already existing templates for a WordPress plugin which would generate the custom RSS feed. That wasn’t too hard to figure out. Once I told the script built into the BBS software I use, Synchronet, to pull from that source I set up a test area on my board and began doing test imports.
This is where things got fun.
The problem, as mentioned in the previous article, is that the formatting of the posts isn’t correct – it will produce an excerpt and the URL fine, but the title will be the website name rather than that of the individual article.
I did solve that problem in a bit of a kludge by setting the RSS feed to be only the most recent article and putting the post title code in the site title area, but this created the annoyance that I’d have to poll my site constantly to check for new pots, lest one get lost in the mix if I do some rapid-rate posting.
The reason is the script hack to put the article title in the website title field puts only the most recent article title up there… meaning if it imported, let’s say, 5 posts, they all would have the same title as the most recent article… which is no better than the original posts just being named “Xadara”
Certainly if I could code better I could figure out a way to make it work. Indeed, it’s likely someone else out there could trivially either set up the RSS hack or fix the script as it is in Synchronet, but as it stands there isn’t too much demand for this kind of thing.
If I do “crack the code” so to speak I’d love to share the compound plugin + theme patch file for other Synchronet Sysops who happen to run WordPress websites to be able to use to import posts, but as it stands I may be the only person on Earth with this exact need, so I don’t think there’s any real rush for it.
I’ll study up on the subject and see if I can’t figure something out… once I do I’ll be super happy. Until then, I guess it’s manual posting again when I get the urge.
Oh well. At least I had fun trying, right?