Collecting External Content
You have weighed the pros and cons of aggregating your online reputation into your WordPress site. The next question is how are you going to do it? And which sites are you going to include?
Basically, you can only include sites that have an API to permit the consumption of the data. That is not entirely true; you could code up a spider that logs into the remote site and harvests the information you want, but that would be pretty obscure and not fun to maintain long term. For the purposes of this book we are going to focus on exposed APIs.
The first option to integrate services is to read the API documentation and create a plugin or other function to consume and convert the information into something WordPress can use, such as a post. Because the underlying architecture of WordPress is PHP, you can use whatever PHP tricks you have up your sleeve and code a nice solution. For more information about plugin development, see Chapter 7 of the book "Professional WordPress Design and Development". In truth, you do not even have to use PHP; you could use an intermediary language and interface with the WordPress table directly.
