*UPDATED* Simple Feed Customizer WordPress Plugin

Hello my Distinguish readers, I am quite excited this day because I just release my first ever WordPress plugin called Simple Feed Customizer.

A year ago, I had a big fight with a scraper website that was stealing my articles.
Whenever an article is published here, the scraper site will also get updated as quickly as possible with same article. More so, I got outrank by this scraper on search engine result page.

The scraper site was a blogger blog and I discovered the blog owner was using an RSS to Blogger IFTTT recipe to steal my articles.

Although I later got the site deleted by Google from blogger after writing numerous DMCA complaints, I began to look for ways to deter scrapers who stole website content. That was how the idea of this plugin was conceived.

In order to deter scrapers – firstly, I change my feed display to Summary, then added a read-more link and at the bottom a copyright text at the end of each article in my feed with the help of this plugin.

Tech4sky.com feed display

Simple Feed Customizer plugin at work

I developed and started using this plugin after the scraper incident although I didn’t release it to the public at the time.

Few days ago, a friend of mine ask in one of the WordPress Facebook group that he needed a plugin that could add copyrighted text to his blog feed. I remembered I had am using such plugin and told him to give me a couple of days to polish the plugin.

It took me two days to re-build and add new feature such as the ability to add include feature image of a post in the feed and adjusting the cache duration of feeds.

How to use Simple Feed Customizer Plugin
  1. Firstly, search and install the Simple Feed Customizer plugin from your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Under Setting menu, click Simple Feed Customizer to go to the plugin settings page.

The plugin settings has four (4) form fields.

Simple Feed Customizer plugin options

  1. To add a read more… link at the end of each feed post, enter the anchor text in the Read more text field.
    By default, WordPress includes […] at the end of a summary feed to indicate post article continuity. Inserting for example, continue reading… into this field automatically adds a link to the said post with the link anchor text being the inputted text (i.e. “continue reading…”)
  2. The Copyright Text field is the sentence that is added beneath each feed article.
    Installing the plugin will pre-populate the field with This article is copyright © Yoursite.com. You are at liberty to alter it.
  3. Next, is the Add Feature Image to feed. Ticking the check-box will add underneath each posts feed, it respective feature image.
  4. By default, WordPress cache feed for 43200 seconds i.e. feed are updated every 12 hours which results in delay of feed getting updated when new articles are published.
    To quicken the feed update, insert a lower time in seconds in this plugin field.
  5. Finally hit the Save changes button.

The changes won’t take effect immediately as a result of RSS feed cache I talked about above. Nevertheless, there is a hack to make the effect instantaneous on feed which is, publishing an article.
As soon as WordPress detect a post has been published, the feed will get updated. If you don’t have any intention of publishing, simply re-publish an old post.

Plugin To-Do

I have quite a number of features am looking to add to this plugin and also changes to make.
For example, the size of the feature image added to feed is large. I will be adding an option to resize the image.

The plugin is procedurally written. I intend rewriting it in OOP with better documentation.

Conclusion

I spent most of my working hours building this plugin. If you are love this plugin, consider buying me coffee via the PayPal donation button located at the sidebar of this blog.
As always, your criticism, contribution and questions are always welcome.

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