The MonkeyChow Reblog Publishing Platform

A recent query from a MonkeyChow user about reblogging got me to rethinking about how it is currently implemented in MonkeyChow. This is not the first time someone has asked me about automatically feeding a blog system like Wordpress with the reblog/recycle feed from MonkeyChow (rss.php). I had previously looked into this back when WP was at v2.0 and rejected a WP plugin called WP-o-Matic because it really hosed my test blog, but this sounded like the ideal tool.

Fast forward to WP 2.2.2 and it seems like the plugin now works as advertised with WP! A blog without frequent posts usually drives people away. I originally wanted to use this type of a tool to boost my post frequency, since I do a lot of reading and make good use of the Recycle box for this site. But this is a quantity vs quality issue and I finally decided that high volume posting was not what I wanted. I find it annoying that some bloggers post minutia as new articles, rather than adding on to an existing article or post in their own comments. However, there are uses for such a tool.

So one of the things that was missing in the MonkeyChow reblog RSS feed was article bodies. That was added this morning to the rss.php. By combining WP with WP-o-Matic, and aiming at your MonkeyChow reblog feed, you can now have a reblog publishing platform. For any article in MonkeyChow where the Recycle box is checked, WP-o-Matic will automatically pick up the article and post it to WP. This can be seen in action at my test blog: http://www.swordcery.com. One of the problems I’m seeing is that there is no link back to the original article, so attribution is an issue.

For this site, I do a similar reblog action with the SimplePie WP plugin which automatically posts in the sidebar to the right.

Update: I found these instructions, which make use of the Get Custom Field Values plugin to make the titles work with proper link attribution. Note that this works for the entire blog, since the change replaces the original function, otherwise we would need to come up with some sort of conditional statement for making the title work with WP’s original the_permalink function, or this one.

To get the source link to work in the post, grab this plugin, install it and activate it.
Plugin Name: Get Custom Field Values
Version: 2.1
Plugin URI: http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#getcustom

Then paste this code:
<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’wprss_link’); ?>
in the loop on your template index.

This code puts the source URL as the link for the post title. Example:

<h3 class=”storytitle” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”><a href=”<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’wprss_link’); ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

 

Fonte: http://www.shokk.com/blog/articles/2007/08/19/the-monkeychow-reblog-publishing-platform/