I’ve been busy adding a few new bits and pieces to my site, in order to not only prove my FTP capabilities but I also thought my site needed beefing up as it looked a little bare. 

Firstly I have added an SMS Text message widget to my sidebar which I downloaded from the wordpress.org plugin directory. The SMS Text Message is a plugin for WordPress to allow blog owners to update their readership via SMS.

A user comes to a site and wishes to be updated (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) via SMS Text Messaging. The user enters their 10 digit phone number on a sidebar widget. The number is then added to a database.  Then every so often, the site admin can send an update via text about what is new on the site etc.

 I then thought it would be fun to add a youtube video widget to my sidebar which I could use to show my favourite music videos, goals and other stuff I find interesting. I therefore installed a Youtube video plugin so that I can display a small YouTube video in my sidebar. Once it was installed I went to the configure options in presentation/widgets and just entered the URL of the video (not the embed code), and it’ll show in the sidebar. I have the option to change the width and height, and make it autoplay or not. The video I am currently showing is Fight Music by D12 - an absolute Hip Hop classic!

I also installed another youtube video plugin which apparently shows different random videos that I’ve selected everytime you load a different page, which sounds much better than the one that I am currently using. However this proved rather complicated and I am going to ask Mez how to get this working, along with my cumulus rotating tag cloud, in Friday’s final surgery session. Keep watching this space…

I thought I embed this online video on how to create a Yahoo Pipe in my blog for people to look at if they are having problems as it was quite useful:

Today, afer a few teething problems I have managed to successfully get a Yahoo Pipe working on my blog which feeds through the latest football news from a variety of sources including Yahoo, Google and Sky Sports. To do this, first of all I visited the site pipes.yahoo.com. Then I clicked on create a pipe. This takes you to the pipe creation page. On here I then dragged on the fetch feed source onto the creation area. I entered the URL of the sites that I wanted to draw the information into my feed from (Sky Sports, Google etc).

Once I had done this  then dragged and dropped a filter box from the Options drop down menu. I entered in her the filters that I wanted. This allows the pipe to only feed through to my site the information I require, which in this case is Football and Leeds United. I linked the Fetch Feed box to the Filter box facility.

Once I had entered this information into the filter I then linked the filter box to the ‘Pipe Output’ box. Here is a screen shot of what a pipe looks like:

When I had finished linking the pipe sections I then saved my pipe as Footy Latest. Then I went into the properties section and added the relevant details such as Pipe title, description, tags etc. I then hit the publish button, which took me to the screen which produced the URL i needed to copy.

I went back onto my Wordpress dashboard/presentation/widgets. I then dragged an RSS widget onto my sidebar so that my Football Latest Feed would display on my blog. Finally I hit the settings configuration option on the RSS widget and firstly pasted the Yahoo Pipe URL into the relevent box and configured the widget so that it would show a maximum of 5 latest football news stories in my side bar.

Although this sounds like a long winded process, it was in fact fairly simple to do, and now I have the latest news in on the beautiful game fed through directly onto my site. All it took was a bit of patience and a quick viewing of a Yahoo Pipe video tutorial on Youtube and Bob’s your Uncle.