I figured it out. This can be really confusing for people who are new to it – it took me more than 10 hours over 3 days to figure it out, because no one starts with the basics, the plugins have frighteningly complex setup and features I don’t need, and the right forum posts are really hard to find. It’s very frustrating for someone who is moving a blog and wants to get new feeds/followers up and running at the new location ASAP, before additional comments that will have to also be moved get posted.
This thread was extremely helpful, once I finally found it. It clarified that a feed link is just a link like any other link.
For anyone else who is having this issue, I found three simple solutions. I’m including all three in case your theme doesn’t support them all, starting with the easiest.
First, you will need to know your feed URL. The Codex article I linked above in my original post discusses different feed URLs (and, yes, as of February 2012, WordPress vs. 3.3.1, it is current). I have permalinks turned on, without any customizations. The feeds I used were https://mydomain.net/feed/ (for posts) and https://mydomain.net/comments/feed/ (for comments). The URL is a little different if you aren’t using permalinks so be sure to check the article. (If you don’t know, then you probably aren’t – it is something you have to select. You can check in Settings/Permalinks – if the first box, Default, is checked, then you aren’t using permalinks.)
1). Use the RSS Icon Widget. This is MUCH easier to set up than the other plugins I tried, and did a very nice job. I ended up not using it because I had to use the widget twice to post the two feeds I wanted, and they were too far apart on the sidebar (a flaw of my theme, not the widget), but if you only want to post one, this is the way to go. A HUGE thank you to Brandon Dove & Jeremy Zinn for seeing a need and filling it in a very user-friendly way!
2). Use the built-in text widget. Put something like “subscribe to my blog” in the title (or you can leave it blank), and use standard link html in the text box to link to your feeds. You can use the html img src tag to add an RSS icon before the link if you want (it goes after the a href tag, but before the link text. Add a couple of spaces after it). This is what I ended up doing – you can visit my blog if you want to see what it looks like.
3). Use a Custom Link on your Menu (Appearance/Menus/Custom Link), if your theme supports it.
In addition to setting up the RSS feeds, I also wanted my visitors to be able to “follow” my blog (i.e, receive new posts as email). For this I used Aditya Jain’s Follow plugin to add the follow pop up at the bottom of my blog. Setting this up isn’t quite as simple as the RSS Icon Widget, but I think most beginners should be able to handle it, as the installation instructions are good. Be sure to check out the screenshots – they are very helpful.
I also wanted visitors to be able to subscribe to the comment feed for a particular post when they comment on it. I used the Comment Notifier plugin for this. The help for this was pretty minimal – they seem to mostly be interested in promoting their paid add-ons for the plugin. It also isn’t as well-developed as it could be – the check-box to follow comments isn’t quite aligned with the text label, and my label came out all caps, which isn’t what I typed or what I wanted. However, it does what I need it to do. Note that there is also a plugin called Comments Notifier which allows multiple people to moderate comments – do not confuse them!
I hope this is helpful to other people who are just getting started, and saves you some time.
