How to use RSS Feeds on your WordPress Site

Well I’ve had the capability to do this for quite some time, but I didn’t bother before now, as I didn’t really want a load of pages no one ever looked at before about viruses, security news and so on as now I can just use my customisable Google homepage to keep an eye on those.

With the advent of the new kid on the block SpyMy, comes some interesting new RSS feeds with issues/news/blog posts very pertinent to this region, and therefore to me, and more than likely my readers so I shall use this as an example.

Step 1: Get & Install the RSS feedList Plugin

First things first, you need to get the plugin. You can do so here WordPress Feedlist Plugin (formerly rssLinkedList).

If you are familar with the WordPress plugin system you should be able to install the plugin with no problems.

If you aren’t basically you need to upload the plugin the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, then go the admin panel and look for the plugins section (/wp-admin/plugins.php).

In here you’ll see a new plugin which is not activated yet, click the “Activate” link, the block should then turn green and the plugin is active!

Wordpress feedList

Step 2: Creating the page for the RSS Feed

Next thing you need to do is in the WordPress admin panel go to Write – Write Page, and create a new page.

You can call it whatever you like, depending on what you are planning to do with it, Feeds, My News or in my case SpyMy as it’s for feeds from spymy.com.

Create Page

If you want it to the very last page in the pages list on your main site, go to the bottom right and set Page Order to something like 100.

Page Order

Step 3: Adding the RSS Feed and Testing it

After you’ve created the page you can add the content, in my case the content of the page is:

Syndicated from <a href="https://www.spymy.com">https://www.spymy.com - Spying the REAL Issues</a>.

<h2>SpyMy Published Items</h2>

<ol>
<!--rss:rss_feed_url:=https://www.spymy.com/rss2.php,num_items:=10,random:=false-->
</ol>

<h2>SpyMy Queued Items</h2>

<ol>
<!--rss:rss_feed_url:=https://www.spymy.com/rss2.php?status=queued,num_items:=10,random:=false-->
</ol>

<h2>SpyMy Top Stories for the past 24 Hours</h2>

<ol>
<!--rss:rss_feed_url:=https://www.spymy.com/rss2.php?time=86400,num_items:=10,random:=false-->
</ol>

To break it down what you need to add to the page is:

<!–rss:rss_feed_url:=https://rssurl.com/rsslocation,num_items:=10,random:=false–>

For EACH RSS Feed you wish to add, the options are quite self explanatory, there are more such as adding custom tags before and after each item in the list, by default there is <li> before and </li> after each entry.

After you’ve saved and published the page, you can check to see if it’s worked.

Go back the main page of your blog and check to see if the link is there, on mine it’s as I wish, at the bottom of the navigation list titled “SpyMy”.

SpyMy Link

On clicking it I’ll go another page where I can see the contents of the SpyMy RSS feeds neatly laid out.

SpyMy Feeds

If you see this, it works!

In my case I have 3 feeds on this page, all from SpyMy, you can customise it however you like and have as many/few feeds as you like.

Step 4: Conclusion

See it looks cool, but it’s not difficult 🙂

Try and setup an RSS syndicated page for yourself on your own WordPress site, it could add value for your readers, or you might just find it interesting for yourself.

Hope this was useful anyway, I seem to be teaching you guys a lot lately 😉

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92 Responses to How to use RSS Feeds on your WordPress Site

  1. Intensecure January 19, 2006 at 4:34 pm #

    Dugg.

  2. Jee January 19, 2006 at 5:43 pm #

    Excellent guide, I was just looking for this kind of info.

    Thank you 🙂

  3. Justin Wong January 19, 2006 at 11:18 pm #

    What an inspiring guide. I never knew this was possible. With your kind permission, I would like to host my own little syndication in my blog so that the public can view the latest posts of several blogs in a single page. See it here

    Thanks

  4. suanie January 20, 2006 at 9:06 am #

    nice!

  5. Abs January 20, 2006 at 9:41 am #

    Why do I need to do this as wordpress comes with default rss feeds…

  6. Matt January 20, 2006 at 10:39 am #

    Thanks!!!

  7. Troy January 20, 2006 at 11:17 am #

    You can also just get an account at feeddigest.com and add the html code for the feed you want into your blog or into a template.

  8. Brandon January 20, 2006 at 1:13 pm #

    This is a great, simple tutorial. It didn’t take much thinking to figure it out.

    I appreciate the shortcut.

    BTW – Found you on Digg

  9. xblog January 20, 2006 at 2:34 pm #

    Great tutorial and good on pointing us a good example. Dugg

  10. Dawn Isaac January 20, 2006 at 2:37 pm #

    Very cool. I just added this to BlinkList.

  11. stopbeingbored January 20, 2006 at 2:46 pm #

    I spent all of last night trying to figure this thing out, come here and 5 minutes later have it up and going. Thx for putting the digg this link on this page, if it hadn’t of been on digg I wouldn’t have found it 😉

  12. ShaolinTiger January 22, 2006 at 12:27 am #

    Intensecure: Thanks for the support dude 🙂

    Justin Wong: Nice implementation, I think you should syndicate me too though 😉

    abs: It PRODUCES RSS feeds, but it doesn’t allow you to syndicate other people’s, read the article please.

    Troy: That’s a neat idea thanks, prefer to stay away from JavaScript solutions wherever I can though.

    Brandon, xblog, Dawn: No probs, glad I could help a bit, I’ll probably do more in the future as I work out how to do other stuff, I’m pretty new to WordPress.

    stopbeingbored: Yah well I thought I’d give it a go on digg, see how it went, turns out it went pretty well, apart from the normal negativity from commentors, you know 250 diggs, 7 bad comments.

  13. Ivan Minic January 28, 2006 at 11:06 pm #

    Very nice post 😉

  14. Jon February 4, 2006 at 1:27 am #

    So here’s a more difficult question. How do you aggregate feeds? So I have two blogs, A and B. I want items posted to B to also appear in A. Of course, when they appear in A their permalinks etc. should link to B. Any plugin recommendations?

  15. famous news February 6, 2006 at 5:39 pm #

    Great article, short and useful

  16. Brett February 22, 2006 at 7:30 am #

    I just added that feedlist plugin and now my whole site is just white. Can’t get to the admin login or see anything.

  17. andrew B March 21, 2006 at 1:24 pm #

    Thanks for the great tips. I also palyed arounf with
    https://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/?p=87 but this seems to give more control.
    From a Brit living in Houston, TX!

  18. Loz June 5, 2006 at 2:28 am #

    Nice one mate. 🙂

    I’ve just added my first RSS feed to my blog
    https://blog.ask-me-about.com/health-articles/

    WTG bro..

    Cheers again

    Loz

  19. Cleopatra's Corpse September 18, 2006 at 5:45 pm #

    Is it as easy to add to your sidebar?

  20. Christine November 27, 2006 at 2:54 pm #

    I just installed this (have the latest wp version) but when I try to activate the plugin I get
    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘{‘ in /home/xxxxxxx/wp-content/plugins/feedlist.php on line 887

    Can someone help?

    Thanks

  21. Neale December 23, 2006 at 10:49 pm #

    Thanks exactly what I needed easy instructions to follow.

  22. Kisakookoo January 24, 2007 at 3:05 am #

    Hi! Why I can’t fill my info in profile? Can somebody help me?
    My login is Kisakookoo!

  23. Craig January 27, 2007 at 8:49 am #

    Thank You.

    Works perfectly 🙂 Off to check out the rest of your blog.

    Craig

  24. Tony Kenobi September 10, 2007 at 12:28 am #

    Hi,

    This is very useful info.

    Is it legal to just publish RSS feeds on your blog\website?

    cheers
    Tony

  25. redneck November 22, 2007 at 6:32 pm #

    cool, i will try this plugin!

    can i use in sidebar too?

  26. solarium December 13, 2007 at 12:44 am #

    super cool – i hope its easy to use too

  27. kayes December 29, 2007 at 5:11 am #

    wow it’s really coollll, I just own $10 with this tips.

    It’s really easy and proper guide to setup RSS feed in WP.

    Thank u so much

  28. ebony March 16, 2008 at 2:07 am #

    God bless you, God bless you, God bless you…

    Worked so well.

  29. Sampi April 4, 2008 at 11:53 pm #

    Works great, thanks, but what i would like to do is get the RSS entries to open on a new blank page? Any simple way to do this?

  30. hiphop videos April 6, 2008 at 5:17 am #

    I never heard of this plugin till just now, thanks for breaking it down. It works great.

  31. Brother Bill April 18, 2008 at 3:17 am #

    When I activate the plugin I get this message: There was a problem initializing the feedlist plugin. Make sure the file feedlist.php is directly under your wp-content/plugins directory and not a subdirectory. That is where I installed it. What am I doing wrong?

  32. Markus April 25, 2008 at 1:34 am #

    I get the same message as brother bill. Anyone know how to fix it?

  33. hinbada April 29, 2008 at 3:45 am #

    I am getting the same error message “There was a problem initializing the feedlist plugin. Make sure the file feedlist.php is directly under your wp-content/plugins directory and not a subdirectory.” Does anyone know how to fix it?

  34. hemz May 5, 2008 at 2:48 pm #

    I am getting this problem to…

    “There was a problem initializing the feedlist plugin. Make sure the file feedlist.php is directly under your wp-content/plugins directory and not a subdirectory.”

  35. 2046 May 17, 2008 at 5:50 am #

    open the feedlist.php an go to line 12. delete one /..
    move it to plugin directory and activate.

  36. drn May 31, 2008 at 11:13 pm #

    thanks 2046..works!

  37. drn May 31, 2008 at 11:16 pm #

    but if want to show on my blog more feed ( from more sites)?
    is possible to have more “rss_feed_url” in feedlist.php ?
    or another method maybe

  38. iphone freak July 3, 2008 at 12:41 am #

    “There was a problem initializing the feedlist plugin. Make sure the file feedlist.php is directly under your wp-content/plugins directory and not a subdirectory.”

    to fix this delete ../ in $relroot = dirname(__FILE__).’/../../’;

    for more rrs feeds

  39. iphone freak July 3, 2008 at 12:45 am #

    feedList(“https://iphone.fanaticdesigners.net/feed/”);
    feedList(“https://www.shaolintiger.com/feed/”);

    or check the readme.txt included with plugin

  40. Alex October 24, 2008 at 7:25 pm #

    maybe im dumb...but it wont work for me. I copy the content and it show like text

  41. Luc November 4, 2008 at 6:21 am #

    After trying all possibilities about the number of slashes in $relroot = dirname(__FILE__).’/../../’ I still have:

    “There was a problem initializing the feedlist plugin. Make sure the file feedlist.php is directly under your wp-content/plugins directory and not a subdirectory.”
    The feesdlist.php file is in C:\wamp\www\wordpress\wp-content\plugins

  42. batman November 16, 2008 at 6:45 pm #

    this is exactly what i’ve been looking for – i’ll give it a whirl.

    thanks a lot – really well written article.

  43. Anita November 23, 2008 at 1:03 am #

    Thanks – That’s a great article.
    I a newbie with RSS feeds. I installed the Word Press feed in plug-in, created a new page and added this:

    It worked the first time but now when I go back to it, it gives me the following error

    Warning: array_slice(): The first argument should be an array in /home/content/p/g/i/testfolder/html/loudoun-web-design/wp-content/plugins/feedlist/feedlist.php on line 241

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/content/p/g/i/testfolder/html/loudoun-web-design/wp-content/plugins/feedlist/feedlist.php on line 417

    What am I doing wrong?

  44. i December 6, 2008 at 2:14 pm #

    hi
    i want the other way around,make my own feed for other web,not other to feed me.Any tips?
    thnx

  45. lindows2008 January 3, 2009 at 10:34 pm #

    DO NOT delete ../ in $relroot = dirname(__FILE__).’/../../’;

    There are two php begin tags used as <?, change them to <?php

    Line 1 and 4th line from function FeedListInitError()

  46. uggs January 16, 2009 at 2:20 am #

    just what i was looking for mate cheers, been looking everywhere.

  47. Natural SEO Advice February 5, 2009 at 5:59 am #

    I have been working with feeds now for a while and it is good to know that you have such helpful information. Without the help of posts like this I would not be doing much of anything.

  48. Peilo February 25, 2009 at 12:43 pm #

    Super Easy, thanks a bunch. Easiest tutorial I found

  49. peter June 9, 2009 at 4:30 am #

    good one.

  50. ORiOn June 19, 2009 at 2:09 am #

    Is it possible to do that but on the template code, so I can add it on my sidebar?

  51. ShaolinTiger June 19, 2009 at 3:10 pm #

    ORiOn: Yes it’s possible.

  52. ORiOn June 19, 2009 at 8:09 pm #

    ShaolinTiger, yes, i saw the readme file. Thank you!

  53. Madhav June 29, 2009 at 12:05 pm #

    Thanks mate… I am the 1000th guy to tell you this, but guys like you make our lives easier!

    Cheers.

  54. Renee August 2, 2010 at 10:41 pm #

    Thank you so very much! You made it super easy, I’m a total tech dummy and could not understand the readme file!! You are awesome for showing how to implement this.

  55. Katz September 10, 2010 at 1:35 am #

    This article helped a lot when I needed the information in a hurry. I am using it in test on my rss page now, need to figure out how to do small little rss feeds as well, any suggestions anyone? Just to put in a small box that can be expanded by the user would be the best. As it stands it seems this plugin uses most of a page. Thank you in advance, ~Katz

  56. Moomette's Magnificents October 16, 2010 at 10:07 am #

    Exactly what I was looking for to share information with my readers on my WAHM blog. Thanks!

  57. David November 20, 2010 at 12:33 pm #

    Very useful link to get the RSS integrated into wordpress. I was looking for the same.

    Thank you so much.

  58. Juan November 29, 2010 at 1:36 pm #

    Was searching for a way to integrate rss into webpage and landed onto this page. Thanks for the info.

  59. Matt Kennedy January 1, 2011 at 6:15 am #

    Very useful resource. I added RSS feeds to one of my blogs today. I ended up using a different program though because the one you recommended wasn’t approved for WP 3.04. What do you think is the best plugin now? I am having issues with the one I am using because it is only displaying the RSS feeds when I click on an article but now on the homepage.

  60. iwatchonlinemovies February 18, 2011 at 12:15 pm #

    Is there a way to do it without a plug-in?

  61. Sunil Sheoran March 12, 2011 at 1:57 pm #

    I have been using wordpress for a while, and i must tell you, the information you provided is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

  62. Webmaster Forum September 17, 2012 at 11:42 am #

    Thanks, I applied rss on my blog successfully. Good Tips

 
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