myriadp web management

Displaying your RSS Feed on Wordpress Page

New page required for our WordPress website, Ski Press. I wanted to pull the RSS feed, from our Skiing blog and display it on a Ski Press page.

Good round-up from Problogger on all the options: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/12/03/everything-you-need-to-import-and-display-rss-feeds-with-wordpress/

However, I didn’t want to use a plugin. So used this code from WP Tuts+: http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/add-the-wordpress-rss-feed-anywhere-in-your-theme/

Steps:

1. Create custom page template
Created PHP file, added this code to the top of the file:
<?php /* Template name: My Custom Page Template */ ?>
Copied all the code from my page.php, into this new page.

2. Added code to pull RSS feed into page, from WP Tuts+ (see above link)

3. Saved PHP file and uploaded into Wordpress theme directory

4. Then able to create a Wordpress page and select the template

5.Added some CSS to style the RSS output
Here is my Page: http://www.ski-press.com/ski-press-blog

Implementing Schema.org

Now that all the major search engines have decided to throw their hat into schema.org (sorry..microformats!) - I decided to change as Bing doesn’t support Microformats.

So I replaced the microformated contact details on the Ski Press website. It didn’t take too long, had a slight problem with embedding items but figured it out quite quickly.

I used the ‘person’ and ‘organisation’ item types:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Person“>
<p><strong><span itemprop=”name”>Robert Stewart</span></strong><br/><span itemprop=”jobTitle”>PR Director</span> – <span itemprop=”worksFor” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization“><span itemprop=”name”>Ski Press</span></span></p> <p><strong>Telephone:</strong><span itemprop=”telephone”> +00 44 (0)1234 123456</span></p> <p><strong>Email:</strong> <a href=”mailto:name@domain.com” title=”Click to send email” itemprop=”email” >email@domain.com</a></p>
<p><strong>Website:</strong> <a href=”http://www.website.com” target=”_blank” title=”External link to website” itemprop=”url” >www.website.com</a></p>
</div>

Useful Links:

Details of schema.org

Google Rich Snippets Testing tool

Wordpress 3.3 Upgrade

WordPress rolled out version 3.3, in mid December.
Seems it was mostly an interface update.

WordPress Introduction to 3.3 ‘Sonny’: http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/

Good information on: Tips to upgrade successfully

Mashable update: WordPress 3.3 Update Refines Features, Interface

Sitepoint article: What’s new in WordPress 3.3

**Update: WordPress 3.3.1 brought out with fixes and security patch http://wordpress.org/news/2012/01/wordpress-3-3-1/

Highlighting Authors in Google search

Want to know how to highlight your author details in Google search - so shows your picture, you need to read this:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920

It involves linking to your Google Profile and adding links back to this profile, to tell Google you are the author.

Some information from Yoast, for Wordpress users:

http://yoast.com/wordpress-rel-author-rel-me/

Test using the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

and don’t forget to tell Google, in this form