RSS Tricks with WordPress

Found an excellent post at Smashing Magazine about setting up Catagory specific feeds, I especially like two points in the post.  For those who are interested primarily in reading only the stuff on my Blog that is Nortel related for example, this technique is pretty cool.  I’ll have to incorporate this in to my theme.

8. Use Category-Specific RSS Feeds

The problem. Many blogs talk about a lot of different topics: design, programming, blogging tips, etc. Have you ever come across a blog in which you have enjoyed only one category of posts? If so, you should definitely consider offering one feed per category to your own readers.

The solution. Let’s say you’d like to be able to subscribe only to TheGridSystem’s tools section. The category URL is:

http://www.thegridsystem.org/categories/tools/To get an RSS feed for this category, you simply have to add /feed to the end of the URL:

http://www.thegridsystem.org/categories/tools/feedPretty easy, isn’t it? But pretty useful, too, in my opinion.

9. List RSS Feeds by Category

The problem. If you like the previous hack, you will probably also want to be able to display the names of all your category feeds in a list to your readers.

The solution.

Edit any of your theme files, where you want to list your categories and their accompanying feeds.
Paste the following code:
Save the file. You categories will now be displayed, along with their RSS feeds!
Code explanation. This hack uses only the good old wp_list_categories() function, with two parameters. The first is feed_image, which allows us to specify the URL to be displayed as a feed image. The second parameter is feed, which is used to specify the feed format.