Jordy Blog

Most people don’t know this, but WordPress automatically builds RSS feeds for specific categories. So if you wanted to syndicate only “tech” stories from the Jordy Blog, you could use this feed:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3

To view which id you could use for a category-specific feed, just click on a category and see what is listed in the address bar. If you don’t see a number, the blogger is probably using a non-default permalink structure (which is good for SEO purposes by the way).

(If a WordPress blog has nested categories, a feed of a parent category will automatically grab any stories belonging to child categories, so there’s no need to classify a story in multiple categories of the same lineage –the most nested applicable categories will do. That also means that there there’s no need to subscribe to a child category’s feed if you’re subscribed to the parent.)

Another cool trick is that you can syndicate several categories at once, and WordPress is smart enough to give you only one instance of each unique post (even though a story might be listed in two or more separate categories). For example, here’s how you would syndicate just my Technology and Business categories:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3,2

No dupes!

But there are several reasons why you might not want to syndicate by category:

1) Category syndication is a little tricky, and you’re lazy.

2) Most bloggers don’t know that the feature is available, and if they do, they know that almost no one uses it. They are unlikely to cater to your needs, categorizing and nesting appropriately, etc. And if they ever move their blog, they’ll likely not redirect category-specific feeds.

3) Category specific syndication means you might miss out on some cool content (especially on the Jordy Blog).

Overall, category-specific syndication is mostly handy for blog aggregation since you may want to syndicate several people’s views on ‘X’, but don’t really care about ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. But since most people aren’t aggregating blog feeds, most people don’t care.

Do you?

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