How to Stream Your Associated Content to a Self-hosted Wordpress Blog

Many contributors at Associated Content have their own personal websites that both link back to their articles, and act as a jumping off point for possible clients to hire them for other web writing gigs. Updating your own website can be troublesome, but you always want to keep your content fresh so potential clients can see your newest and best work. There is an easy solution that anyone can do for free, and all you need is a webhost, a Wordpress script and the address to your Associated Content RSS feed.

Get a Webhost

While it is possible to sign up for a Wordpress account at Wordpress.com, you can get a much more attractive URL and bypass mandatory advertisement display by using a free webhost like 000webhost.com. You host must offer PHP support and SQL database support to upload Wordpress. I recommend 000webhost because they are ad free, they offer more than other free hosts, and upgrading to a domain name with unlimited hosting is cheap. Visit 000webhost and set up your account.

Upload and configure Wordpress

Wordpress is available as a free download at wordpress.org. Unzip the file and upload the folder in its entirety to the public_html directory of your server. I recommend using an FTP client such as Filezilla to quickly transfer your files. You will need to follow the instructions on the readme file, which will involve configuring your server paths, setting up an SQL database and changing the permissions of a few directories. After you have finished the setup, you can administer your website entirely from the wp-admin page. Uploading and configuring the PHP files is the hardest part of this whole process, but it requires only simple computer knowledge and no scripting. Now is the time to choose your theme and configure your actual blog.

Install the Feedwordpress Plugin

From the Wordpress dashboard, go to the plugins manager and select add new. Search for Feedwordpress, and install only the plugin with that exact name. After you install and activate the plugin, there will be a new "syndication" option at the bottom of your dashboard's navigation. If you just want to stream your article feed to a wordpress.com hosted site, install this plugin and start from here.

Configure your feed

Now you will need to configure your feed so the website knows what page to pull your articles from. Each contributor has their own RSS feed that outputs a list of your articles in .xml format. For example, the address of my feed is http://www.associatedcontent.com/rss/user_1103075.xml. To find your feed, get your user ID from the address bar on your profile page and replace my profile ID with yours. Go to the syndication tab and input the address to your RSS feed, and confirm that the example article it brings up is indeed one of yours. After you add the feed, update it by clicking on the update button for good measure. Now your latest articles should be streamed onto your Wordpress blog. For an example of what can be done with this type of technology, check out my personal site. With paid hosting, the whole process is even easier because I was able to install Wordpress with the Fantastico auto-installer straight from my control panel. Remember that any web development is basically bypassing problems you encounter one by one until your result matches what you had in mind.