Advice on getting live feed to WordPress blog

Have you looked at third party services or products that are used for this sort of thing — i.e. running races? There are no doubt quite a number of options since it’s a big market…

I don’t think RSS feed are the way to go here for 2 reasons:

1. If you were pulling in RSS fed, all the links would point to the other site.

2. RSS feeds are usually only updated every 12 hours or so.

What’s wrong with logging into the site and updating/publishing Posts?

Wpyogi – I haven’t yet, being a club they are on a limited budget and so I was hoping to find a low budget way off addressing it. I will investigate the possibility. Thank you for the suggestion.
esmi – Thank you for that feedback. I’ve spent a couple of hours reading up on RSS feeds but couldn’t find anything that gave me that sort of information. I think your suggestion of the updated posts might well be the way to go. They do have an RSS feed from the BBC Swimming on their front page and I think they really wanted something similar to that.

Thank you both for your valuable advice.

If anyone else has any thoughts I’d still be very interested to hear them.

They do have an RSS feed from the BBC Swimming on their front page and I think they really wanted something similar to that.

The point they are missing is that someone actually enters each of the results onto the BBC site. The feed is the final result of that work. The feed from their WordPress site will do exactly the same if they enter all of their results as Posts.

There may be low-cost or free options, but it’s likely one of those things where you get what you pay for. As esmi suggested, the easiest and cheapest way would be to just post results as they become available via a WP page. I’ve also seen sporting events post results via a Twitter and/or Facebook link/feed on their page. But you’ll probably need to sort out how important (i.e. $$) this is to the swim club decision-makers and what kind of functionality they are willing to support.

Esmi – They do know that someone will have to sit and type each result in, it’s just what they type it into. As I say, I’ve done very little with feeds – when you say the feed from their WordPress site will do exactly the same if they enter all of the results as Posts, can you expand a little on that for me?

WPyogi, I will Google the use of Facebook and Twitter as feeds as I’m not sure how that would work. Can you suggest anywhere that I could start reading?

can you expand a little on that for me

WordPress automatically creates an RSS feed containing all of your Posts.

Also, it it helps, I created a very simple Twitter plugin for a client that allows you to pull a Twitter feed into your site via a widget. Not played with it for a while but if you decided to go down the Twitter route, that might help.

I don’t know first-hand how it’s set up, but I think you have to set up a twitter account for your organization and then stream the feed for that account to a webpage – looks like there are various ways to do it. You’d post results using that twitter account/name so they show up on the page. Look on twitter to start.

EDIT – BINGO! esmi’s bag of tricks to the rescue once again!

`h