Feeding on Lorelle on WordPress

In one of Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” radio interview programs on NPR, she discussed all the ways people use to get her attention in order to be on her show, and how one innovative band wrote a song about her. That got her attention.

I’m not asking you to write songs about me, but if you are looking for ways to get my attention, a comment on this blog will do it. In this case, however, it was the idea of “feeding on Lorelle on WordPress” that caught my attention:

I’ve recently discovered Lorelle’s blog on all things WordPress and decided that I wanted to follow her entries on a more regular basis. However, I have been reluctant to add her feed to any of the categories currently in my Thunderbird reader, since her site topics don’t really easily fit into any one of those categories. And I don’t like creating new feed categories until I already have several that fit the category.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that the perfect place to keep tabs on her feed is to add it to my WordPress administration panel, right alongside the other WordPress news feeds that are already piped into there by default. The process of adding her feed was actually a pretty simple matter of copy-paste-modify.

Jim of Writer’s Blog, obviously a fan ;-), has written step-by-step instructions on how to modify the Dashboard panel of your full version WordPress Administration Panels to feature Lorelle on WordPress instead of or in addition to the feeds coming in from WordPress Planet.

If you aren’t that big of a fan of this blog, then you can use the same technique to add other feeds to your WordPress Dashboard panel.

I thought I’d written out similar instructions in an article last year, since I’ve done the same thing for several WordPress blogs, but I can’t find my article, so I’m grateful for Jim for writing this up.

I think the sidebar accessories, WordPress Widgets, are very slick for allowing customization of WordPress.com blogs, but I’d really like to see a similar thing done which allows us to customize our WordPress Dashboard with feeds, to help us find content to write about and keep up with our favorite sites via the WordPress interface. Especially for WordPress.com blogs.

NOTE: Applying this hack to your WordPress Dashboard makes it vulnerable next time you update WordPress. Make sure you make a copy of the template file, and that you save the instructions on how you did it (copy and paste the text from the article into a text file is one way) in the same directory clearly labeled so you can either restore or add back this hack to your WordPress Dashboard template file. Maybe someone will come up with a WordPress Plugin that does this gracefully so it will stay in place through the upgrades.

Thanks, Jim, for the thrill. You definitely got my attention. And thanks for filling in a blank in my documentation that I thought I’d covered already.

Later: I found my article on adding feeds to your WordPress Dashboard. It was in a post that didn’t release because of the damn future-posts-not-posting WordPress.com bug. Since it’s almost verbatim what Jim wrote, I won’t release it. I wonder how many posts haven’t posted since March because of this damn bug? Sigh.

Related Articles

• The Perfect WordPress Dashboard
• Benefits and Uses of Website Feeds
• Create RSS Feeds on Any Web Page
• Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!
• Customizing Your Feed Titles
• Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress
• My Daily Tasks With WordPress
• Blogging Tips – Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog
• Playing with WordPress.com New Sidebar Widgets
• Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets
• Using Your Feeds for Story Ideas

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