Importing and displaying external RSS feeds on your site is a great way to share your online activity with your visitors. If you are active on Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, or Tumblr, your visitors will enjoy staying current with your updates. Many social media sites provide exclusive feeds for user-generated content that may be imported and displayed on virtually any web page. In this article, you will learn three ways to import and display feed content on your WordPress-powered website — without installing yet another plugin.

Update: This article applies to older versions of WordPress (less than 2.8). For WordPress 2.8 and better, please check out this post at Digging into WordPress. Thanks!

On the menu for this tutorial:

• Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (simple method)
• Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (advanced method)
• Importing and displaying feeds with SimplePie (WordPress not required)

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You have seen user-agent blacklists, IP blacklists, 4G Blacklists, and everything in between. Now, in this article, for your sheer and utter amusement, I present a collection of over 8000 blacklisted referrers.

For the uninitiated, in teh language of teh Web, a referrer is the online resource from whence a visitor happened to arrive at your site. For example, if Johnny the Wonder Parrot was visiting the Mainstream Media website and happened to follow a link to your site (of all places), you would look at your access logs, notice Johnny’s visit, and speak out loud (slowly): “hmmm.. it looks like the Mainstream Media website referred my good pal Johnny to my Alka-Seltzer sales page.” In such a bizarre case, the Mainstream Media website — or specific page — is referred to as (no pun intended) the referrer.

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After several months of working diligently behind the scenes, I am officially announcing my latest project: a new book on WordPress. Without giving away too much at this time, here are some facts about it:

• It’s focused on WordPress
• It’s co-authored between Chris Coyier and myself
• It’s going to be awesome

Chris and I have been working on the book for several months now and are very pleased with the results. Both of us have some — albeit limited — knowledge of the publishing world. Truth be told, we don’t have a publisher yet and aren’t quite sure about how to go about finding one.

Does anyone happen to know more about finding a good publisher? Are there any publishers out there interested in talking about this book? Any other folks have any ideas or advice? Please share your ideas in the comments area below or contact me directly.

In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template:

<a href="mailto:?subject=Fresh%20Linkage%20@%20Perishable%20Press&amp;body=Check%20out%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>%20from%20Perishable%20Press" title="Send a link to this post via email" rel="nofollow">Share this post via email</a>

Within the code, you will need to edit both instances of the string “Perishable%20Press” to reflect your own site name. Note that the “%20” is the encoded equivalent of a blank space, and is required to ensure validation of parameterized query strings. As is, the code will generate an email that is populated with the following information:

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In celebration of CSS Naked Day, Perishable Press has disabled it’s CSS stylesheet for today, April 9th, 2009 (which also happens to be my 37th birthday)!

What are you waiting for? Go get naked!! ;)

Yet another fine reason to celebrate the current Quintessential theme design here at Perishable Press is graciously provided by the fine folks at CSS Perk. CSS Perk features a growing collection of superior CSS-designed websites, and is always a great source of inspiration and ideas for new design projects.

Seeing my current theme showcased at CSS Perk is very inspiring, and a super-cool way to celebrate my upcoming April-9th birthday. Many thanks to the awesome peeps at CSS Perk for sharing Perishable Press with their audience — it is greatly appreciated! :)

So what are you waiting for! Go check it out and kick this old hard-working dog a few stars! ;)

I checked my Feedburner subscriber count on April 2nd and was surprised to see that the number of RSS subscribers had dropped from around 1800 to around 1100. The next day, my subscriber count decreased again, this time to around 700. Today, my Feedburner statistics increased slightly to around 1000 subscribers. So, in the course of three days I lost around 40% of my loyal readers, according to Google Feedburner. Will I get these subscribers back? Will my Google subscriber count return to normal? Why did my Feedburner count drop in the first place? Let’s explore the issue and try to answer these critical questions.

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