Sometimes you don’t want your RSS readers to get certain categories in their feed. There are a number of ways to fix this and I’m going to show you how to change the WordPress feed sent to Feedburner. You can exclude more than one category as well.
Chatting with my Life Coach today, Pete gave me feedback about how the postings in my blog for the “Twitter Thoughts” may not be providing much value to RSS readers. I agreed that a random set of 140 characters summarized each week could seem random and confusing. I started using Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin to collect my Twitters when I was doing 5 a week. Now I’m Twittering upwards of 50 and can see things look ba-jumbled.
Removing Categories from Your RSS feed
Platform: WordPress. I run my blog on WordPress MU which is similar to WordPress self hosted (.org) and WordPress hosted (.com)
Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s website had just what I was looking for.
- Sign into WordPress
- Go to “Manage”
- Go to “Categories”
- Find the category you want to exclude and mouse over the the number on the right under “posts” as this will show you the category ID in the lower left hand corner of your browser
- Take that category ID (in my case, it was 315) and use it in this syntax where you :
<a class="linkification-ext" title="http://domain.com/feed?cat=-315" href="http://domain.com/feed?cat=-315">http://domain.com/feed?cat=-315</a>
Have 2 categories to remove?
Add the second category with an ampersand (&) in front:
http://domain.com/feed?cat=-315&-320 - Put this somewhere safe like your text editor
- Sign into Feedburner
- Click “Edit Feed Details”
- You will now change your “Original Feed” to reflect the code above
- Test it. View your feed in your browser and all posts in that category will be gone.
Question: Will this cause subscribers to lose my RSS feed?
Answer: No. This won’t change anything for your subscribers. The “Feed Address” is what subscribers use.
Should I make a video tutorial for this? Let me know.
