Some people asked me how do i display my recent blog posts on directory sidebar. Well there are two methods, first is using javascript but we wont talk about it. Why because, it is executed on client side and doesnt come from server side, so it is like not SE friendly and so people like me and you hate it.

Second method is to use a PHP script to read RSS and convert it to HTML. For this you need two files named rss2html.php and template.html. [ Download them here ]. Then follow these steps.

1. Upload both of them to your directory root folder.

2. Edit your directory’s init.php file and somewhere in middle spot out the following
$tpl->assign(’MetaRobots’     , trim ($MetaRobots)      );
$tpl->assign(’MetaKeywords’   , trim ($MetaKeywords)    );
$tpl->assign(’MetaDescription’, trim ($MetaDescription) );
$tpl->assign(’MetaAuthor’     , trim ($MetaAuthor)      );
$tpl->assign(’MetaCopyright’  , trim ($MetaCopyright)   );

3. Immediately after that insert the following code

$rssurl=”http://www.web1directory.com/rss2html.php”;
$blogfeedurl=”http://www.web1directory.com/blog/feed/”;
$templateurl=”http://www.web1directory.com/template.html”;
$url=$rssurl.”?XMLFILE=”.$blogfeedurl.”&TEMPLATE=”.$templateurl;
$html = implode(”, file($url));
$tpl->assign(’latestposts’,$html);

4. Remember to edit the top three lines. $rssurl (first one) is the path to your rss2html.php file, second one is your Blog feed url and third one is template.html file URL.

5. Save the init.php file

6. Open your template and whereever you want the recent posts to appear, put {$latestposts}. You can edit the template.html to control the looks of your directory

7. You are done.

regards

aditya