Jordy Blog

Category-Specific Feeds in WordPress

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?

If you liked this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Planet for Blog Aggregation

I just finished setting up Planet blog aggregation software on planet.provolabs.com. It clearly needs some CSS work done on it, but all of the functionality is there.

I was worried that (without an prepackaged RPM) setting it up would be difficult, but installation was much easier than I anticipated. Because it’s just a python script run on a cron job, there were no new dependencies to resolve. Thanks for the help, Gabe.

As a side note, I’ve also added a bunch of much-needed links to my blogroll. Sorry to those of you who had been shunned for so long! Obviously there are more to add.

Misspellings via RSS

When you do a Google Toolbar spellcheck while editing a post in WordPress, bad HTML is inserted secretly onto your post. This HTML isn’t visible on your WordPress post, but it does show up via RSS (and when you view the page source) –even after you substitute the green links. If you subscribe via Bloglines, for example, you’d see a big list of the words that you misspelled (or that Google didn’t understand) at the bottom of your post. To fix it, you can just view the HTML of your post while in edit mode and delete all of the Google spellcheck garbage out.

You can see this could be kind of embarrassing, so I thought I’d let you all know. I purposely misspelled a bunch of words and used Google spellcheck on this post so you can see what I’m talking about. Anyway, it’s probably best to spellcheck elsewhere until this is fixed.