Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In WordPress

A little known fact is the possibility to subscribe to RSS feeds of WordPress categories, authors or tags instead of the full site feed. This can be really useful if you love to subscribe to one specific author, category or tag of the blog. One prime example could be to subscribe to a Firefox RSS feed to get all the updates that are posted in the Firefox category or using a specific Firefox tag.

Usage is pretty simple. The basic rule is to simply append /feed/ to the url to access the RSS feed of the category, tag or author. To give you an example. Jack started posting about Linux today at Ghacks. If you wanted to subscribe to his Linux articles you could do it the following ways: Subscribe to the Linux category, tag or the author.

This method is not unique to Ghacks. It is the native way how WordPress handles feeds. You can use it on any standalone WordPress blog as long as they are not catching all feed requests and sending them to a feed processor like Feedburner. (I disabled the feed fetcher plugin to make the custom feeds work)

The best way to try this out on other sites is to simply append /feed/ at the end of the url to see where it takes you. If you are redirected from a category, author or tag to the main feed of the site it is using a plugin or script that does that. You'd otherwise get a feed for contents that you are interested in, without having to cope with other posts on the site that you may not be interested in. If you are a Windows user for instance, you may want to exclude Linux or Mac articles from the feed as you may not be interested in those.

 

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