WordPress has the capabilities to produce RSS feeds for any website it powers. Just head over to any WordPress blog (try this one!), and append /feed to the URL to get a nice RSS2 feed. (You could also try /feed/atom for an Atom 0.3 feed, or /feed/rss for a RSS 0.92 feed.) But you probably knew that already. But did you know WordPress has the capabilities to produce feeds for any archive page you can find? It’s an incredibly useful feature that few people take advantage of.
Let me give you a few examples. I read Ryan’s blog. He posts a lot of good stuff but normally I’m only interested when he’s talking about WordPress. No problem, I find the archive page for his WordPress category, append /feed to the URL and off I go: there’s an RSS feed containing just the posts in Ryan’s WordPress category.
Now, lets say I read a multi-author blog like Jalenack. Now, for some reason, I’m only interested in reading posts by Andrew. Right, so appending /feed to the archive page for Andrew’s posts will give me a feed of exactly what I want.
Finally, a mention about comment feeds. These are normally linked to, but appending /feed to a permalink gives you a feed for the comments on that post. Try using the comment feeds next time you want to keep up with a discussion.
Incidentally, this would also work for day, month and year archives. However, this is likely to be less helpful as feeds are normally used for seeing when content is updated. I can see however that if you’re building some software that could use the post detail in an easily parseable format, try using the RSS feeds for that archive page.
WordPress’ feeds can be extremely powerful. Try using the more advanced features to target what exactly comes through your feed reader.
