Thank You Google!

It’s become pretty clear that if you want to know anything, there is only one place to turn in this day and age: Google! Well ok, Yahoo, Ask.com and any of the other search engines also work, but I like Google because their name has become a verb and it sounds cool when you say is.

For the past three days I have been asking my trusty friend Google a lot of questions as I tried to take a crash course on PHP and WordPress plugins. The goal was to set up a YoBeat store and a better way to display our links section. The store was actually pretty easy, and now the world can buy YoBeat Tshirts and stickers. Please note I am not getting any Tshirts made until someone orders one, so get on that.

The links page proved to be much more involved. What I wanted to do was basically set up an RSS Feed of sites that I feel are worthwhile. I am pretty much obsessed with RSS feeds these days as they are much easier than typing in web addresses to sites which may or may not have been updated. Basically, they keep you in touch without having to try, and being somewhat lazy, I like that. So I figured, why not make an RSS page on YoBeat so that people can use it to read blogs I like as well as YoBeat. I mean, if I like it it must be good, right?

Of course doing so proved to be much more difficult than I would have thought. First I had to find a plugin to do it. Since there are about a million designed to aggregate content, and most of them don’t work, I went through several before finding one that actually functioned. I finally settled on the BDP RSS Aggregator which is totally customizable and fairly simple to set up. Simple, that is, if you want to put it in your side bar.

In order to get the output on a stagnant page, I had to figure out how to get PHP into a page, which required two things I didn’t have: the correct plugin and any knowledge of PHP.  I figured out I needed a plugin via Google, but the first one I tried had no instructions and wasn’t working. It only took me a day to figure out the PHP plugin was the problem, not the aggregator plugin. Luckily, Google knew of another PHP plugin, Exec PHP, with much better documentation. Since this one actually had instructions, it told me I needed one more plugin, Role Manager  to set the appropriate permissions. A few setting changes and voila! The Yobeat friends page was born. Hopefully all my hard work pays off and people realize what a good resource it is, blah blah blah, but if not, at least I feel like I accomplished something!