Sometimes I wish I could create a blog where I can republish interesting posts and articles I find on the net, with my comments and thoughts added to it. But I want to do it in a way that the credits for the post go to the owner.

With ReFeed and the ReBlog plugin for wordpress it can be easily done. Refeed works as a feed reader/collector and once you’ve subscribed your favourite feeds into it you have the option to publish the desired posts to a compiled RSS feed which you can post into your wordpress with the ReBlog plugin. Being able to tag your feeds you can actually feed different blogs based on the different RSS generated by the different tags.

To get this working just install ReFeed in your hosting and subscribe to your favourite feeds, then download the ReBlog plugin for WordPress. After installing and enabling the plugin you have to edit the plugin’s main file and add the address of the RSS feed from the ReFeed you want to use. You can find this address by clicking on the option “Published Feed” in your ReFeed admin area. The line you need to look for in the file is like this:

// Complete URL to RSS 2.0 output from reBlog, typically ends with “out/rss.php?v=2”.
define(‘REBLOG_URL’, ‘http://yourhosting.com/refeed/out/rss.php?user=1‘);

The part in bold is to be replaced the address of your ReFeed RSS.

After all this you will see a button called “Fetch Feeds” on the top Right hand corner of your screen. This is actually really annoying as it sits right on top of the logout link, but this can be moved by editing the plugin adding a few more pixels to the styling. To do this, navigate to the Plugin page and click on “Edit” next to the ReBlog plugin, there you will need to edit the following line.

<style type=”text/css”>
#reblog-form
{
position: absolute;
top: 50px; #this is the line you need to add so the button seats right under the logout link. In WordPress2.5 it looks very nice.
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
right: 3em;
font-size: 20px;
color: #666;
}
</style>

So there you go, happy ReBlogging.

Technorati Tags: ReBlog, ReFeed