…effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

WP Tavern pointed out that WordPress recently incorporated SimplePie into the core for anything related to RSS parsing (such as Dashboard and sidebar widgets). This means it’s in the WordPress project should definitely be keeping an eye on this issue.

I think that either the SimplePie community needs to take it upon themselves to continue development, or fork the project with long-term intentions. (Perhaps the Automattic people could create a fork and maintain it along with WordPress?)

EDIT: Ryan McCue, an ex developer of SimplePie, has created a new fork and he and Matt Mullenweg are trying to pick up the SimplePie domain name. (Mullenweg has offered to pay for hosting and domain renewals.) So, the short story is: development of SimplePie will continue.

If you use the Loop/Category approach, you end up with tons of short, two-sentence posts. That means each of your 347 sideblog entries has it’s own permalink page where 97% of the page is just the single.php template. Google doesn’t really like pages with little “original content,” so you could potentially have a problem on your hands. Even if you’re not that worried about what Google thinks of your blog, you still have 347 permalink pages, which could get in the way.

Here’s my solution:

1. Create a new Tumbleblog using Tumblr.com.
2. Use the SimplePie WordPress Plugin to easily put the Tumbleblog feed’s contents in your blog sidebar.

Simple (pun unintended). Now you can post your sideblog entries to Tumblr, and they will appear on your blog.

The SimplePie plugin has a directory full of templates that decide how your sideblog feed is displayed. The included templates don’t work well for a sideblog, so I’m including my custom template as well as the function call required to display the sideblog.

Sideblog SimplePie Template:

{ITEM_LOOP_BEGIN}
<li>
<strong><a href="{ITEM_PERMALINK}">{ITEM_TITLE}</a></strong> <small><i>{ITEM_DATE}</i></small><br/>
{ITEM_DESCRIPTION}
</li>
{ITEM_LOOP_END}

Copy/paste the template into your favorite text editor and save it as “sideblog.tmpl.” Upload it to www.yourblog.com/wp-content/plugins/simplepie_plugin/templates/. Now that you have the plugin installed and the template updated, paste this code into your blog template where you want the sideblog to appear:

<ul>
<?php
echo SimplePieWP('http://feeds.feedburner.com/wsc-sideblog', array(
'items' => 5,
'cache_duration' => 900,
'date_format' => 'n/j/Y g:i A',
'template' => 'sideblog'
));
?>
</ul>

And your done!