WordPress Wednesday: Category-Specific RSS Feeds
Posted on April 8th, 2009
Do you want to highlight the content in one of your blog’s categories? If you have a blog that covers a wide range of topics, for example, there may be some readers who are only interested in one of those topics. As such, they may only want to subscribe to the content being assigned to that category. In like manner, is there a category that you would like to exclude from the RSS feed? Maybe you have a category that gathers your Twitter updates and you don’t think it’s completely appropriate to have this content as part of your main feed.
Well, both of these tasks for a WordPress-based blog are not that difficult. In fact, the process is quite straightforward. For most blogs, the main RSS feed will take on this format:
http://www.example.com/feed/
If you want to view the RSS feed for only a single category, visit the page for that category and add “/feed/” to the end of it. For example, the feed to the WordPress category on this blog is:
http://blog.bluefur.com/category/wordpress-wednesdays/feed/
If you want to exclude a category from the RSS feed, the process is a little more involving. Access the category list from your WordPress dashboard. If you hover over the category you’d like to exclude, you’ll notice that the target URL ends in “&cat_ID=##” where ## is the category number. Using this information, you can construct the RSS feed URL as thus:
http://www.example.com/feed?cat=-##
Note the “-” before the category number. That excludes that category from the feed. In like manner, the lack of the hyphen (or “minus sign” if you prefer) would result in an RSS feed for only that category. Since the resulting feed can look quite messy, you may want to want to enter the resulting feed URL into Feedburner to produce something cleaner.
Check out this post by Jennifer Mattern for more information.
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Related Topics:
WordPress Development: Automatic Feed LinksWarm and Fuzzy StatsWordPress Wednesday: WordPress Mobile EditionWordpress Wednesdays: Rock Both Full Feed and Summary RSSHow to make Twitter more like FriendFeed
4 Comments
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Thanks for this great tips. I always use the traditional rss method before. Never know that we can give specific rss category before until read this post.
That’s a great way to seperate the content for users. This would be a good testing tool for users interest also.
Very useful and great hosting reviews……thanks.
Thank you for the simple explanation, which I found after reading through a couple of complicated ones and even trying an elaborate plugin system.
My need was for a RSS link to deliver a monthly newsletter. So I have a dedicated category for that and people who prefer to receive the newsletter that way can be supported.