How to Remove a Category from Your Wordpress RSS Feedburner feed

Dec 31st, 2008 @ 03:40 pm › Adria Richards
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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 :
[sourcecode language='php']http://domain.com/feed?cat=-315[/sourcecode]

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.

Categories: RSS Tweaks, Wordpress, Wordpress Tweaks
Tags: code

restmin

It's seems so simple, but isn't working. I want t remove my twitters from my feed too.

Feedbuner Looks like this
Original feed: http://restministries.com/?cat=-7
Feed address http://feeds.feedburner.com/RestMinistriesChron...

My original feed that WORKED was http://restministries.com/?feed=rss
I've tried every combination with http://restministries.com/?feed=rss
like

http://restministries.com/?feed=rss?cat=-7
Regardless, I get the error message
The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file.

site is restministries.com - you can see twitter category here
http://restministries.com/?cat=7

any help is appreciated, have worked onthis 45 minutes

Zig Baird

@restmin For your RSS structure, if you wanted to do an RSS feed on just one category, you would use:

http://restministries.com/?cat=7&feed=rss

where "7" = your category number.

I would think that if you use the "-" sign before the category you want to omit:

http://restministries.com/?cat=-7&feed=rss

as your Original Feed in Feedburner, this might work for you. I can't test it since your Feedburner is redirecting all RSS requests.

Hope that works.

Fernanda Thiesen

works perfectly! thanks!

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Removing Categories from Your RSS feed