When one of my friend introduced me to Ubuntu Linux I was impressed by its user friendliness. Till that day I had used Red Hat Linux, Fedora and Knoppix. They were not cut out for an average PC user. In my opinion a geek using Linux doesn’t make Linux popular. Its an average PC user who will make it popular. The guy who introduced me to Linux was not a software guy in fact he is a doctor, oncologist to be precise. Ubuntu replaced Red Hat as my preferred Linux distro. Then came Compiz and shiny effects on Ubuntu made me a die hard fan. Till then I didn’t know Ubuntu was based on Debian. Then for more than 2 years, I didnt boot into Windows, when I needed Windows I ran it in a VM environment in Ubuntu. But Ubuntu was for an average user and this year I decided to switch to Debian. It turns out that I made a correct decision. According to TuxRadar, Debian is the the best Linux distro of 2011! If that wasn’t all, Debian was favoured by Linux.com as their choice of production server.
Month: August 2011
Use WordPress Update Services to automatically create static XML feeds
WordPress blogs server Atom and RSS feeds by default. One can outsource this job to a 3rd party services like feedburner. The existing built-in system in WP serves XML feeds on-the-fly. What that means is a if a feed reader/consumer requests your feed then WP is actually querying MySQL, doing all the back-end server side job and serves a hot, out of the oven, feed every time even if the posts are days or months old. This should not bother a very low traffic blog. But then you can set up WP to create physical static feed files using a plugin. This works for most of the scenarios. But I had a requirement that wanted a remote server to fetch and display those feeds. So even if I had set up a plugin to create static XMLfeeds to avoid server hits, the remote server would still need to query my server introducing network latency. There is a way out. WP has a built in update service that tells remote servers as soon as there is a change in blog. This service is known as “WP update service“. This is a sort of RPC service. You can provide WP a remote URL that should be notified as soon as a change in blog occurs. Now its up to that remote service to take an action on it. On my remote server I set up an action which as soon as receives this update message contacts my blog, fetches a feed and caches it locally. Now the remote server doesn’t need to look at my blog until and unless there is a change, of which it will be notified. One can take this a step further. In update services set up the url to a script on same blog that will connect to your blog and create XML feeds along side your blog files in feedsfolder. Use this code in your in wp-content/themes/{your theme}/functions.php
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 ); // Removes the links to the extra feeds such as category feeds remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 ); // Removes links to the general feeds: Post and Comment Feed
This will stop printing the default URLs for feed in HTML source and in wp-content/themes/{your theme}/header.php add the URLs for actual feed files that now your script is creating. No need to install a plugin. The only drawback I see here is when you update your skin you loose this particular customisation. Other than that its a pretty good way to create static XML feed files and save your server some hassles.