Tumblefeed

Current Version: Tumblefeed 1.1

Tumblefeed does not currently work under WordPress 2.5. An update will be released should there be enough demand.

Tumblefeed modifies your WordPress feed to act more like a tumblelog. By reducing the number of feed items to one a day, Tumblefeed prevents your visitors from suffer feed overload when your WordPress-based tumblelog is updated multiple times a day.

Installation

Drop tumblefeed.php into /wp-content/plugins/ and activate the plugin.

Features

  • Changes your feed to only output one item a day (posted at midnight your local time), containing all your posts from that day.
  • The day’s item will link to a permalink of all your posts on that day.
  • Full posts will abide by your <!–more–> usage, allowing you to limit the amount of text that appears in your feed.
  • Does not modify comment-based feeds, so readers are free to receive comment updates.

Important Note: Due to the nature of this plugin, heavy modifications are made to WordPress’ feeds. Plugins altering the contents of feeds will most likely not work and have unexpected results. Also, since this plugin essentially adds more content to the same feed, processing power required to display a tumblefeed increases. If your server is low on resources, it’s highly recommended to use Feedburner or wp-cache to alleviate the additional resource usage.

Customization

Since tumblelogs are often styled differently based on the type of post, tumblefeed offers the same functionality. Modifications must be made in the plugin file itself, but aren’t too difficult if you have modified your theme before. Line 105 and 142 are essentially WordPress loops and all tags used in the loop are valid.

Here is an example modification made by Ben Gray of openswitch:

if ( in_category('6') )
	$content .= '<p>' . the_title('<strong>', '</strong><br />', false) . get_the_excerpt() . '</p>';
elseif ( in_category('1')  )
	$content .= '<p>' . '<em>Thought:</em> ' . get_the_excerpt() . '</p>';
elseif ( in_category('8')  )
	$content .= '<p>' . '<strong>Podcast:</strong> ' . get_the_excerpt() . '</p>';
else
	$content .= '<p>' . get_the_excerpt() . '</p>';

Download Tumblefeed

Current Version: 1.1
Released: 2007-09-23
WordPress 2.3 Compatible

Download Tumblefeed 1.1

Version History

1.1 - Bug Fix

  • Updated to work with WordPress 2.3.
  • Fixes feed updating issues when using services such as Feedburner.

1.0 - Initial Release

18 Comments

  1. 1 Will on Aug 15, 2007 at 12:46 am (Quote):

    Great work Ronald! I will be giving this a try. Thanks for all your hard work!

  2. 2 Ronald Heft on Aug 15, 2007 at 1:42 am (Quote):

    Glad you like Tumblefeed. If you notice any problems, let me know and I’ll check them out.

  3. 3 c. wess daniels on Aug 15, 2007 at 6:38 pm (Quote):

    thanks ronald! I can’t wait to try this out.

  4. 4 Vonye on Aug 30, 2007 at 3:30 am (Quote):

    Hi, I am using your tumblefeed.

    (posted at midnight your local time)
    By local time, you mean host local time? How to modify it to post at midnight of my real local time?

  5. 5 Ronald Heft on Aug 30, 2007 at 2:55 pm (Quote):

    The time is based on the time configured within WordPress. However, there is a bug with posting at midnight that I’m in the process of working out.

  6. 6 Kirk T on Oct 18, 2007 at 11:23 am (Quote):

    Ronald - I love your plugin, and I’m trying to get it customized for my site now. I have a few quick questions…

    Is it possible to make the posts obey the normal “More” behavior of WP instead of displaying [...] after so many characters? I would like this for almost every post since they are short tumbles and don’t have too much content after the [...] anyway. For the longer ones, I put the “More” link in there.

    Also, how could I add some text before the date as the title? For example, “Site Name on October 18, 2007.” Everywhere I try ends up breaking the plugin so I must be missing something.

    Thanks for any help, and great work even without customizations.

  7. 7 Kirk T on Oct 18, 2007 at 2:59 pm (Quote):

    Never mind the first question. Firefox’s feed preview was truncating the feed when previewing.

  8. 8 Kirk T on Oct 18, 2007 at 3:24 pm (Quote):

    And never mind the second question. Looks like some editing of line 54 will do the trick.

    Thanks again.

  9. 9 Ronald Heft on Oct 19, 2007 at 2:22 am (Quote):

    Glad to hear you figured it out yourself Kirk. I was going to suggest the same things you mentioned. Well, if you run into any more problems, don’t hesitate to ask questions.

  10. 10 Kirk T on Oct 19, 2007 at 2:55 pm (Quote):

    OK, this one I can’t figure out. When I publish the feed using Tumblefeed, my content gets thrown into one paragraph or one line. I’m testing it out at:

    http://livetardy.com/TestWordPressSite/wordpress

    My normal feed without Tumblefeed separates the individual paragraphs in the feed and displays them just like on the site - spacing between them and everything. This seems to vary based on the reader, but ultimately all the text is bunched up and sometimes the pictures are bunched up or displayed inline.

    I’ve made a few modifications as described above per category ID, and I’ve tried writing with and without the rich text editor.

    Any help would be great, if it’s possible to change.

    Thanks.

  11. 11 Ronald Heft on Oct 20, 2007 at 10:57 pm (Quote):

    Kirk, I just looked over your feed and I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. All the paragraph breaks are in it correctly. If it’s not displaying correctly, that’s the fault of the feedreader. I just checked on a few different readers and it looked fine to me. Any specific reader giving you trouble?

  12. 12 Kirk T on Oct 22, 2007 at 10:02 am (Quote):

    Ronald - The paragraphs within a single post that are actually what’s giving me trouble. I’ve posted a screen shot of the differences between the feeds once Tumblefeed is activated at the test web site to help clarify what I’m talking about.

    http://livetardy.com/TestWordPressSite/wordpress

    Thanks again for taking the time to look at it.

  13. 13 Ronald Heft on Oct 22, 2007 at 10:11 am (Quote):

    Did you perhaps change get_the_content to get_the_excerpt when modifying Tumblefeed? Unmodified lines 145-149 should look like this:

    // Normal WordPress loop outputting the excerpts
while ($dayPosts2->have_posts()) : $dayPosts2->the_post();
	// Use get_the_excerpt instead of the_excerpt_rss since we're modifing the_excerpt_rss (aka endless loop)
	$content .= '<p>' . get_the_content() . '</p>';
endwhile;
  14. 14 Kirk T on Oct 22, 2007 at 10:46 am (Quote):

    Nope, looks like each category is changed to get_the_content the second time through.

    I’ll try using the original Tumblefeed lines again to see if it changes anything. I’ll let you know if fixes it or not so you don’t have to troubleshoot what I’ve messed up.

  15. 15 Kirk T on Oct 22, 2007 at 11:06 am (Quote):

    I just started over with your original plugin, and I get the same results. I even removed the tags around both the get_the_excerpt and get_the_content sections to see if that changed anything, and it doesn’t appear to (I was thinking maybe the readers don’t recognize ‘nested’ Ps?).

  16. 16 Ronald Heft on Oct 23, 2007 at 5:56 pm (Quote):

    To be honest, I’m stumped on why this is happening. Your feed looks fine in most of my test RSS readers, but I do see a couple of them not displaying the paragraph breaks. As far as I can see the HTML code is correct.

    One thing I haven’t tried is validating your feed for errors. I see you don’t have Tumblefeed enabled, but if you ever want to try it again, run your feed through a validator. Maybe some rouge HTML is messing up the parsing.

  17. 17 Brandon Philips on Jul 12, 2008 at 3:42 am (Quote):

    Tumblefeed for 2.5? :D

  18. 18 Jim on Jul 17, 2008 at 2:17 pm (Quote):

    Tumblefeed for 2.6 x2! :)

12 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. openswitch » Tumblefeed Plugin for WordPress
    on Aug 14, 2007 at 7:18 pm

    [...] Heft has released version 1.0 of the tumblefeed plugin for WordPress. I’m already using it on this site, and if you’re running a tumblog on [...]

  2. Tumble-like Feed Available at Tribe Now | Lo-Fi Tribe
    on Aug 15, 2007 at 11:50 am

    [...] a need for a simplified feed for Tumblelog-like blogs. Ronald rose to the occasion and released Tumblefeed 1.0. The guy is a genius! Thank you Ronald! Also, I can not thank Ben Grey enough for helping get the [...]

  3. openswitch » WordPress Tumblog How-to
    on Aug 15, 2007 at 12:39 pm

    [...] feed feat, but why reinvent the wheel? Ronald Heft Jr. has already done the work for you with his Tumblefeed plugin! Simply install it, activate it and your feed will update once per day at midnight. Ron was so kind [...]

  4. Transformatum | Blog Archive | More Tumbling on WordPress
    on Aug 15, 2007 at 11:37 pm

    [...] instead of Matt’s Asides technique. If you decide to go tumbling and post frequently, then check out Ron’s feed plugin, [...]

  5. IAMWW » Tumble-Hybrid: The Perfect Personal Website Format
    on Aug 17, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    [...] Tumblefeed reduces your feed into only one feed item per day. This single feed item includes all of the posts for that day. [...]

  6. openswitch » How to make a tumblog with Sandbox
    on Aug 18, 2007 at 8:25 pm

    [...] than that, however, you really are done. Of course, with any tumblog I would recommend you use the Tumblefeed plugin so you don’t accost your readers [...]

  7. openswitch » How to make a tumblog with Sandbox
    on Aug 19, 2007 at 5:49 pm

    [...] you’re done! Wasn’t that super easy? Of course, I think every tumblog should use the Tumblefeed plugin so you don’t accost your readers with a billion feed updates each [...]

  8. Tumbling the Feed with Tumblefeed | Lo-Fi Tribe
    on Sep 11, 2007 at 9:58 pm

    [...] Tumblefeed plugin testing! I’m still testing out the Tumblefeed plugin by Ronald Heft of CaveMonkey50. The Tumblefeed plug will prevent an overload of posts being [...]

  9. Tumble-Hybrid Sandbox Port Theme | Lo-Fi Tribe
    on Sep 25, 2007 at 9:30 pm

    [...] and Tumble-Hybrid will take care of you! Also, you may want to check out CaveMonkey50’s Tumblefeed plugin, if you plan on posting 10x’s a day or more. You friends’ feed readers will thank you! [...]

  10. Crooked Press » links for 2007-11-11
    on Nov 10, 2007 at 11:21 pm

    [...] Tumblefeed · cavemonkey50.com * Changes your feed to only output one item a day (posted at midnight your local time), containing all your posts from that day. * The day’s item will link to a permalink of all your posts on that day. (tags: plugin rss tumblr wordpress) [...]

  11. Tumble-hybrid Deuce WordPress Theme
    on Feb 7, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    [...] CaveMonkey50’s Tumblefeed plugin, if you plan on posting multiple time per [...]

  12. links for 2008-06-04 - Chroniques du web
    on Jun 3, 2008 at 9:33 pm

    [...] Tumblefeed · cavemonkey50.com (tags: wordpress plugin rss blog tumblelog tumblr) [...]

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