Creating a Separate ‘Page’ for FeedWordPress Plugin

Genealogy News Ticker Site

I spent the last two days looking for a decent plugin that would allow me to display excerpts for constantly updating feeds from important sites for my genealogy blog, Empty Nest Genealogy. After several rather disappointing trials, I finally found the ‘FeedWordpress‘ plugin.

It was exactly what I was looking for except for one thing. By default it writes to the main page of my blog, disrupting the flow of my own genealogy posts and making my categories drop-down menu pretty much unusable because of the sheer number of categories it set up.

So I went back to the site to see if anyone else had the same problem and sure enough, there were several who did. However, the site administrator replied that it was not possible to set this up separate from the main blog. There’s nothing like hopes dashed after being so hopeful about the results of a plugin.

Then – BRAINWAVE!!! I remembered that I had just set up a demo blog on this site for my theme demos to load from and it was working great. Why not do the same thing for my genealogy site, only this time set it up for the feeds?

Here’s what I did.

•     Using FTP, I created a folder for a ‘sub-blog’ within my ‘Empty Nest Genealogy’ (www.emptynestgenealogy.emptynestheritage.com) directory. So, I set it up and called it ‘Genealogy News‘, the resulting url being ‘www.emptynestgenealogy.emptynestheritage.com/GenealogyNews’.
•     I installed WordPress in this folder to set up the sub-blog.
•     The downside of this setup is that the theme, advertising, plugins, widgets, etc. have to be installed from scratch. The plus side of this is that you can make it completely different from the main blog, which I did.
•     Install your plugin and set up per the plugin instructions.
•     Create a link in the upper horizontal menus of the main blog and the sub-blog to each other.
•     I then created a ‘sticky post’ in the main blog containing a link to the new sub-blog that I intend to leave for a while announcing the brand new news feed.

…and VOILA! You’re all set.

I just hope that this saves anyone interested all the time and frustration I put into finding the plugin and figuring this out. ENJOY!