Added a Blapril 2020 Page
Sure — it’s like… 10 days 11 days (by the time you see this) in, but to be fair — I did actually create it a few days ago!
One of the things WordPress bloggers often look on with envy at their Blogger counterparts is the really quite nice widget for a blogroll that updates with most recent posts. Now — as you can see, if you look over the right and scroll down a bit — that this is in fact quite possible with WordPress too… But the catch is, you can’t do it on free WordPress. You’ll need to either be hosted or have paid a fair bit on WordPress’ premium plans to allow access to plugins.
Provided you have that through either means — then WP RSS Aggregator is the plugin you’re after. You can grab it for free and run a sidebar without any issue.
One of the addons I did pick-up for it though was the Category option. Which allows me to do things, like categorise the signed-up members of Blapril 2020 according to Mentor, Participant and Newbie! :D
I did this for Blaugust 2019 and it was a great way of keeping up with the posts (as much as humanly possible, at least).
If you’d like to take a look — it’s up there in the menu bar. It’s also right here.
Wondering why I didn’t post about it right away? When I was struggling to come up with topics even? Well, turns out there’s a bit of an oddity with how I’ve got things currently setup. Last year, I had to protect my site against some attacks and at the same time reduce my CPU usage with the host. So I disabled WordPress’ own heartbeat psuedo-cron completely and replaced it with my host’s actual cron setup.
Bit of a long story short — the new categories didn’t update with posts (even if they were sites I was already tracking under a different category) until a new post came through. So when I first created the post, it was showing hardly anything from anyone.
I’ve given it a few days and it looks more or less ‘complete’ now. So it’s the right time to share!
If you spot yourself, or anyone else that you know to be in the wrong category — let me know and I’ll fix it up!
This was a post for Blapril 2020, the annual blogging event (albeit usually as Blaugust), brought forward to help bring a sense of community during the challenging time of COVID-19. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in, year round!
