Hobby Stash

January 25th, 2009

Feedburner Feedsmith Plug-in Category Fix

Feedburner WP plugin Category Fix enhances the original plugin to automatically redirect category feeds to the appropriate Feedburner feed. If you are using WordPress as a CMS and have a lot of sub categories, it’s a bit cumbersome to set up initially.  Also, the plug-in has not been renamed (should be) to differentiate between the fix and the original plugin. I would recommend deactivating the original version and uninstalling it before installing this one to eliminate confusion. Needless to say, you need to use category permalinks for this to work.

To me, the cleanest way to solve this problem is still via htaccess but in my case, it caused timeout errors which I suspect has more to do with the host server than feedburner. But I’ll give this a shot for awhile and let you know if I have any issues.

Posted in Hobbystash Design, RSS Feeds, Wordpress
By Linda

January 21st, 2009

Adding Category RSS Feedburner/Google Feeds

My website is a conglomeration of a variety of hobbies. As such, readers might want to follow one of my hobbies while others are of no interest. Wordpress has built in RSS feeds for categories and posts but I’m using Feedburner so that I can track the number of readers. I wanted a way to track by category the number of subscribers. Perishable Press to the rescue with a tutorial to Redirect WordPress Individual Category Feeds to Feedburner via HTAccess.

Of course, I had to muddy the waters by moving my feeds from Feedburner to Google. It converted the main and comment feeds just fine but went crazy when it tried to convert the category feeds. Thankfully, since they were new feeds, there were no subscribers. But I feel for those trying to move an established subscriber base. I ended up deleting the original feeds and recreating through Google. Once recreated, I used Perishable Press’s technique to redirect Wordpress’s category feeds to the new Google feeds.

Right now I have my feeds more or less hidden in plain site in the links section of the sidebar. They will eventually be incorporated into each category’s main page once I decide how and where.

Posted in Hobbystash Design, RSS Feeds
By Linda

September 25th, 2008

Feed For All

I decided I wanted to include a RSS feed for the non blog pages of my website. Towards that end I found FeedForAll, an inexpensive program that does the trick. It’s somewhat confusing but if you understand html, you can stumble your way through it. I’m still wrestling with getting css to work in the feed (for formatting image alignment) but it does provide normal information just fine.

A 30-day trial is offered. If you decide to purchase, be advised that registration key generation takes up to 24 hours….so if you wait until the 30th day of the trial period to purchase, you may find yourself high and dry for a day while you wait.

My Rating:  

Posted in RSS Feeds, Software/Plug-ins
By Linda