WordPress Category Feeds

Did you read the article?

If you’re a subscriber or frequent visitor here, you may have caught my how-to article about including category feed links for each post’s category. You can see how this looks on every post on my site — at the top of the post is the category name with a tiny feed icon before it. Clicking the feed icon opens the RSS feed page for that category. You can copy the link and paste it into your feed reader to subscribe to the category.

I wrote the article right after I made this modification to my site. It seemed like a good WordPress trick to share with readers, so I put it online. At least 130 people read it on my site. But then I got to thinking about it and realized that I might have a good paying market for the article. I submitted it to my editor at Informit and they bought it. So I had to take it offline.

Fear not! Informit.com is a free source of articles on the Web. So when it gets through editing and into production, it’ll be back online there and I’ll have a link to it on this site. Unfortunately, that’ll take at least a month. I’m not their only writer and there’s plenty of other content for them to get online. I’m still waiting for four articles I’ve written for them in the past month to appear online — three of them are of special interest to WordPress users.

But I thought I’d take a few moments to explain why I went through the bother of creating category feed links here. Read on to see if this technique works for you.

Why Category Feeds?

Without repeating too much of what’s in my Informit article, here’s the deal.

Everything I’ve read about successful blogging says that a blog must have a specific topic to succeed. If you visit my Web site or subscribe to my primary RSS feed, you know that I’m just not following that rule. My site/blog covers all kinds of topics: computing for Mac users, computing for Windows users, flying, writing, photography, stuff going on in my life, travel, blogging, productivity, and so on. It’s a hodgepodge of information and opinion and I seriously doubt whether everything I write about is of interest to anyone.

While I could start multiple blogs, each of which covers a specific topic, I’ve been there and done that and I didn’t like it one darn bit. Too much work to do, especially when it’s time to upgrade!

Fortunately certain topics are of interest to a lot of different people. One person might like what I write about WordPress while another might like what I write about flying. Neither of them care a bit about the other topic. They don’t want to subscribe to my main feed to get the tidbits that interest them. They might not even want to visit the site regularly to see what’s new and interesting for them. They stop by once or twice, read things they like, see things they don’t care about, and forget to come back.

I want to capture those visitors and keep them coming back for more. I figure that the best way to do that is to offer RSS feeds (also viewable as “Live Bookmarks” in Firefox — my browser of choice — and possibly other browsers) for every topic on the site. This way, people who want to follow certain topics I write about can do it without having to wade through the stuff they couldn’t care less about.

How WordPress Makes this Easy

WordPress makes it easy to publish category feeds — it does it automatically. All a reader has to do is know the URL for the automatically generated category feed. And all I’ve done is give it to them on a platter, by creating a link with the feed URL beside the category name in a post header.

My article goes into the how-to aspect of this in some detail, with the code I used to make it happen. Copyright agreements prevent me from repeating that code, which is the main content of the article, here. (Sorry, but I do write for a living, which means I need to get paid for my work sometimes.)

I did write an article some time ago that explained how to create an RSS feed page like the one on my site: “How to Create a WordPress RSS Feed Page.” As that article explains, you can use the wp_list_cats tag to include your RSS feed link for a category in parentheses after the category name. That’s handy on an RSS feed page like the one I wrote about, as well as in sidebar listings of categories. For most folks, that’ll be enough.

I used a more “in your face” approach. I just hope it works.

Thoughts on the topic of category feeds? Use the Comment link to share them with other readers.