Taymar over at MMORPG-INFO just asked me an interesting question about one of the blogs she subscribed to:

“I subscribed to a website the other day and within 48 hours I’d received 150 posts. This is obviously well and beyond what I am willing to read.

Looking on their site (and clicking all their feed buttons) only gave me the option of a full feed — but when I looked, I found that there was also a feed per category. Thing is, I had to find it, they aren’t linking to it at all.

Do I have a feed per category too and just don’t know it?”

This is an excellent question, and if you’re a Wordpress user, the answer is yes! By default, Wordpress provides feeds for the following:

  • All articles
  • All comments
  • Comments on any given article
  • All articles within a given category
  • All articles with a specific tag

As a blogger, it’s worth providing links to these feeds - particularly if you have a high traffic blog, or different types of articles that have different audiences. You can give these URLs out as-is, or you can pipe them through a service like Feedburner if you want to keep track of subscriber numbers, etc.

As a blog reader, it’s useful to know about these feeds, even if they’re not publicsed. On Money Blogger, I don’t use Wordpress categories, but use tags instead. If you wanted to subscribe to just the ‘tips’ that I post, you could use the URL:

http://www.moneyblogger.org/tag/tips/feed/

If you were interested in MMORPG-INFO’s news section, you could use the URL:

http://www.mmorpg-info.org/category/news/feed/

Basically, if you add ‘feed/’ to a Wordpress URL, you’re likely to find an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, even if it’s not advertised on a blog.

Wordpress allows you to do a whole lot more with RSS and Atom feeds. If you’re interested, take a look the Wordpress Codex page on feeds.

Subscribe to Money Blogger for more tips.

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