Need HowTo do limited distribution RSS or update notification

  • I’m completely ignorant of RSS. Six months ago I was completely ignorant of blogging but now I’m an old pro thanks to WP, so I’m willing to learn here! ??

    My blog has a narrow audience and I’d like to allow registered members to subscribe to a feed if they want to be advised of changes to categories. Can someone point me to a howto about what I need to do to syndicate my site? Thre’s too much detailed info on this site and no higher-level info – for example, don’t tell me what code to put into a page until we’ve established what it is that we want to do in a more general sense. I don’t know if I need to understand the nuances of v1.1 v2.0 or whatever. I don’t want Google to pick up on it (at least not just yet) primarily because I want to avoid spam. I just want to point my members to that feed so that they can get notification, and when I have this down I can open up a little more.

    I know I can use a plugin to send e-mail for this too but I’d like to learn about how RSS works with WP. The cat2email plugin is a little trigger happy, sending a notice on every update and I have no control over when it sends. I want to send notification for a new posting only when I want – not automatically. I don’t want notifications to go out on update, only new posts. Subscribers can decide for themselves if they want to be notified of updates.

    Pointing me to some higher level docs to RTFM is fine (I can easily Google for RSS myself) but I’d like to focus on how this works with WP to start.

    Thanks!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • For email notification itself, have a look at feedblitz.com.

    As far as RSS goes, how about category feeds? http://domain.com/blog/categoryName/feed (assuming using pretty permalinks) generates a feed specific to only stuff in the category “categoryName”. Is that what you’re after?

    Thread Starter Tony G

    (@starbuck)

    Yes, I just checked and it looks like a category feed would be great. What would I tell people about subscribing to that feed? I’m guessing I just explain the URL pattern and tell them to point their RSS v2 reader there?

    Has someone else posted an announcement on their blog which explains how to do this to visitors? Perhaps I can emulate what someone else has done successfully.

    Feedblitz seems like an good option, thanks. I really don’t like those “club” sites, but if the shoe fits…

    Any other plugins like cat2email which might transform the RSS to HTML and email it to registered users who subscribe to a category?

    You have a ready answer and obvious understanding of the options, but I have no idea where to go to find this wisdom. Existing documentation is focused on people who sort of want fish, like “type this”. I want to know what the options are (learn how to fish so to speak), why one might select various options, and then syntax will be helpful. Thanks again.

    Category Feeds: If your theme is using wp_list_cats() to put the list of categories on the sidebar, you can add a parameter to also have it show a feed link for each cat. See feed or feed_image parms on that linked page. Might just do that and then put up a static page explaining RSS a bit and what your readers’ options are with your blog (elaborating on the fact that you’re encouraging category based feeds).

    I know nothing about cat2email, sorry.

    Click my name on the left. Check in the sidebar for the feedblitz bit. Not sure what’s “club” about it? It works great for folks still tied to email and not quite ready to embrace RSS readers and such.

    As for how I’ve learned the WP stuff: Mostly with a willingness to search here in the forums and in the codex. I tend to use google and the site args to help me locate things. (site:codex.www.ads-software.com category rssfor example)

    Thread Starter Tony G

    (@starbuck)

    Thanks Chris, based on your info I might close this soon. As an aside, I see your WP 2.0.3 feed pages behave exactly as I described here. I’ll leave this open a bit to see if anyone else can point to some specific docs on these topics. Hunting through the Codex is often akin to walking into a restaurant and then checking the refrigerator in the kitchen to see what’s for dinner, rather than having a knowledgable waiter or a good menu. You get to eat well but it takes so long. ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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