WordPress Tip: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds

It’s a good habit to post a summary of your recent posts once or twice a month, but like all blog maintenance it can be a pain in the butt if you don’t make it as easy as possible. Here’s a hack that’ll let you create a summary of all of your posts over X number of days using a handy-dandy Yahoo Pipe.

How to Create a Digest Post

  1. Click on this link to go to the Yahoo Pipe
  2. Change “Truncate feeds older than 7 days ago” to the number of days back you want to go
  3. Change “Enter RSS URL” to the feed address to match your blog
    • I would use http://internetducttape.com/feed or my FeedBurner address
  4. Click on the Run Pipe button
  5. Cut and paste the output from the pipe into a new blog post using the WordPress rich text editor

Ta-da! Now you’ve made a digest post. You can edit the text and summaries as necessary, or adjust the date and re-run the pipe if the amount of time is not correct.

Advanced users can make a clone of that pipe and change it to have your feed url and the date range you want by default.

Sample Digest Post

This was cut and pasted from the pipe output with no modifications.

 

Advanced Users

It doesn’t look great when you cut-and-paste the code from the Yahoo Pipe to a WordPress blog post. You can fix that by using my Yahoo Pipe Cleaner script with Greasemonkey.

See the full list of free software I have created.

You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.

Subscribe to feed

More Pipes

Here’s a list of more Yahoo Pipes I’ve created.

This entry was written by engtech, posted on July 13, 2007 at , filed under Becoming a Better Blogger, Technology, Yahoo Pipes. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

22 Comments

  1. Arpit Jacob
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    awesome tip … I been meaning to do a digest post every weekend .. thanks you made my job easier. :)

  2. Arpit Jacob
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    mmmm it if I copy paste directly into the wordpress editor it puts some junk html code and CSS which is not a problem for most people. also all the links are too my feedburner I prefer linking too my own links. mmm I need to play with the pipes more

  3. SteveL
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    Excellent hint!!

    Just curious: on your home page, do you use YahooPipes + customization to get the very cool affect (i.e., graphically surround each summary with a different color, etc)?

  4. engtech
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Arpit: Yes, this doesn’t work as well if you are using FeedBurner and you have feedburner click tracking turn on. I realized a while back that I never actually looked at the stats for feedburner, so I turned off click tracking.

    @SteveL: I’m not sure what you are talking about… can you put a link to the page you are talking about?

    If you’re talking about this page: http://internetducttape.com/tag/engtech-blogging-how-tos-tech-news-and-reviews/ and you meant how I put different icons on different summaries… that is done using CSS and setting up different background images based on the categories in the summary.

  5. SteveL
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    Yes, that’s the page that I’m referring to.

    The layout is very cool, with the icons and graphic background.

    Question: did you generate the content with the Yahoo pipe?

    Thanks!

  6. engtech
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    @SteveL: Nope, the content is from my blog theme. I use a theme that displays excerpts on the archives pages instead of showing the full posts. The “summaries” link goes to an archives page that shows the excerpts.

  7. SteveL
    Posted July 13, 2007 at | Permalink

    Just as I suspected, engtech, you’re layout is too cool to be ‘easy’! Nice work, though. Very nice.

  8. Rachel
    Posted July 14, 2007 at | Permalink

    Super tip, thank you!

  9. engtech
    Posted July 14, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Steve: Ah, my layout is pretty complicated and messy because it was my first time using CSS. :)

  10. David Bradley Blog
    Posted July 20, 2007 at | Permalink

    Great tip, I had to copy from source selection to retain the links though, that could be a problem with Clip Cache or something…

    Anyway, I’ve implemented the idea to cross promote my Blogging Tips site on my Science News site (www.sciencebase.com)

    db

  11. Elaine Vigneault
    Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    Looks like Yahoo Pipes limits the results to five. Is that correct?

  12. engtech
    Posted August 23, 2007 at | Permalink

    @Elaine Vigneault:

    If you see the form where it says:

    “Truncate Feeds Older Than 7 days ago”

    Change the 7 to 14, or 30 or what-have-you to go back further.

    If that doesn’t fix the problem, then you may have your blog feed configured to only display 5 items or so.

  13. Mike Conrad
    Posted August 25, 2007 at | Permalink

    Nice tip. Thanks!

  14. Philip Churchill
    Posted October 21, 2007 at | Permalink

    My list only shows 10 items for the last 7 days, although there are over 22 posts. How do I display all of them. If it’s something I need to change at feedburner.com, wheere is it?
    TIA

  15. STEREO
    Posted October 26, 2007 at | Permalink

    Here’s a way to only include Most Read posts in a digest.

    http://www.stereo.org.ua/2007/wp-top-posts-automated-email-how-to/

    Not a 3 seconds trick but there’s an added benefit of maillist integration.

  16. Philip Churchill
    Posted October 27, 2007 at | Permalink

    Hi STERIO,
    The article on the site you link to is only any good for someone using Wordress.org NOT WordPress.com.

  17. engtech
    Posted November 04, 2007 at | Permalink

    @philip

    we resolved this by email, and it was because he had his wordpress feed limited to 10 items.

    Dashboard >> Options >> Reading >> Syndication Feeds, Show the Most Recent X number of posts

  18. Cat
    Posted November 21, 2007 at | Permalink

    I’ve not actually thanked you for this yet. This is excellent and I’ve used it a few times and recommended it to others.

    Thank you very much. :)

  19. Ashish
    Posted November 29, 2007 at | Permalink

    Cat linked me to this. I haven’t done this myself yet [as the month is yet to be up...] but have recommended this to others. Thanks for the great tool. :)

  20. mpb
    Posted March 11, 2008 at | Permalink

    I have a suggestion or request–
    is there a way for someone (i.e., you; in case I mess up my copy of the pipe altogether) to modify the pipe so the images, including the avatar, are not collected (just the text blurb) or better yet, collect only the titles with links? (I have an animated image which never finishes loading so the Pipe Cleaner can run)

    When the pipe is exported as an email alert, Yahoo adds the date besides the title, also useful.

    The purpose is–
    I would like to have a chronological list of posts in my WordPress. Now I do this manually using Zoundry blog client to insert titles into a new post. I also use Zoundry to create a list of my posts alphabetically (even more of a chore). Any pipe dreams for this latter?

    Thank you.

  21. engtech
    Posted March 12, 2008 at | Permalink

    @ mpb:

    I have an rss2html program I wrote last week that will let you write HTML templates around an RSS feed. You can loop over any items, sort them, do whatever you want.

    I just need to write a front end for it to make it more usefriendly. I’ll email you a beta once I have some documentation so you can try it out.

  22. mpb
    Posted March 12, 2008 at | Permalink

    I’m game.

13 Trackbacks

  1. By Three Blog Night » Weekly Digest #1: The Rebirth of Terry Heath dot Com on July 15, 2007 at

    [...] WordPress Tip: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds on the blog Internet Duct Tape, engtech shares a time-saving tip that uses Yahoo Pipes. All you do [...]

  2. By Terry Heath » Weekly Digest #1: The Rebirth of a Blogger on July 16, 2007 at

    [...] WordPress Tip: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds on the blog Internet Duct Tape, engtech shares a time-saving tip that uses Yahoo Pipes. All you do [...]

  3. By Weekly Digest: The First Week of this Blog on July 20, 2007 at

    [...] a digest of the week’s posts, but putting it together can be time consuming. However, in WordPress Tip: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds on the blog Internet Duct Tape, Engtech shares a time-saving tip using a Yahoo Pipe he created. All [...]

  4. By Summary posts of the last 10 days « My Writings - A wide angle view of India on July 21, 2007 at

    [...] posts of the last 10 days From Engtech’s blogpost I found out how to make a digest post. Here it is, basically of a brief overview of the posts of the [...]

  5. By รวมฮิต Starred Items ใน Google Reader at Run As Never Get, Wander as Never. COMe on July 23, 2007 at

    [...] WordPress Tip: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds [...]

  6. By The Gene Pool | Post Digest on July 27, 2007 at

    [...] InternetDucttape site wrote this great post on how to create an digest post in 3 seconds. Well, i thought i would give it a try. This is the [...]

  7. By Break The Silence on September 07, 2007 at

    Wicked Yahoo! Pipe

    Engtech’s Yahoo! Pipe for removing old posts from your feed is pretty wicked on it’s own. But if your using it to create a digest post, like the one below, sometimes you’ll want to have the oldest post first, and the more recent one …

  8. By Weekly Digest: September 21, 2007 : Elaine Vigneault on September 21, 2007 at

    [...] This digest was produced using a Yahoo pipes tool from engtech/ Internet Duct Tape. [...]

  9. By » Del.icio.us: Ukens anbefalte lenker - Leif Dalands blogg - IT & Produktivitet on September 29, 2007 at

    [...] WordPress: Create a Digest Post in 3 Seconds Internet Duct Tape - Hvis du ønsker å gi dine innlegg litt ekstraliv kan du lage en oppsamlingspost med innlegg fra de siste x dager. Les her for å se hvordan. Et stikkord er Yahoo Pipe. [...]

  10. By Weekly Digest: Sept. 29, 2007 : Elaine Vigneault on September 29, 2007 at

    [...] This digest was produced using a Yahoo pipes tool from engtech/ Internet Duct Tape. [...]

  11. By Blog Tip: Create a Link Post in 3 Seconds « Internet Duct Tape on October 03, 2007 at

    [...] This is the successor to my post on how to build a weekly digest in 3 seconds. [...]

  12. By Weekly Digest: November 3, 2007 : Elaine Vigneault on November 03, 2007 at

    [...] This digest was produced using a Yahoo pipes tool from engtech/ Internet Duct Tape. [...]

  13. By Year in Review - Most Popular Posts of 2007 « // Internet Duct Tape on February 01, 2008 at

    [...] showed bloggers how to easily create a digest post, create a link digest, and create a blog command [...]

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