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.
I think I've finally gotten the count of my main feed to work correctly. It entailed updating my theme to include the new feed link. Although it's suppposed to redirect all the info, suffice it to say, the stats were irratic at best.
I'm still wrestling with the individual category feeds though. I'm getting lots of timeout errors when I try to add features to the feed…..arrgh. At this rate it might be awhile before I incorporate the feed subscriptions into my category pages.
I'm spending way too much time on this. Think I'll go quilt for awhile.
It turns out my feed issue was related to the HTAccess setup recommended by Perishable Press. Google doesn't like it. So I've eliminated it for now and will continue research on how to redirect those feeds. I can at least now start incorporating some manual links on the category pages in a more prominent spot….but sure wish I could auto redirect the wordpress feeds…saga continues.
Good grief…feed count above was fine this morning…come back this afternoon and it showing zero?!? ..maybe it's time to look for an alternative to Feedburner. This tranisition to google is clearly not going smoothly.
LOL….it is true you should wait a few days before panicking about feed count when you transition your feeds to Google. Everything appears to be working now. Total site feed count has decreased but category feeds are increasing nicely. Time to figure out a way (other than ugly chicklet) to incorporate those counts on category pages.