My (probably) biggest problem, still? Probably lack of experience in coding.

For reference: I followed the directions of “#4. Embed an RSS Reader” from another URL at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/02/mastering-wordpress-shortcodes/ . It worked perfectly. Except that when used it only shows titles/links. Not excerpts or actual content.

So, searching around the internet for a better solution (that could show some content), I found your post here.

The other post had code that made a function, that I pasted into my theme’s functions.php file. Then I used [function_name] in the post’s HTML to call it, and display the results on a blog page.

I have eagerly looked at your plug-&-play code above– several times– but unfortunately I am not knowledgeable enough yet to know how to turn it into a function, etc., and access it from a blog post.

How do I use this? How do I access it in the HTML of a blog post, to have the content show up on a blog page?

Thank you for taking mercy on me and bringing the “plug-&-play” instructions down to an even simpler level !!

RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: couldn't connect to host

This appears in the dashboard and I get similar errors when placing the snippet into the page. I developing this locally on MAMP.

$feed->set_cache_duration (43200);

This will update the feed every 12 hours, but you could theoretically set it for any amount of time (just don’t go crazy!)

So, All you should do is this:

if ( function_exists('fetch_feed') ) {
$feed = fetch_feed('http://....');
}

wp-includes/feed.php is included automatically for you (to access the various feed template functions and fetch_feed()), And requires SimplePie if required to load the feed.

It’s not a big deal; it’s just the first place I looked for it. :P