Subscribe to the RSS feed of a category, author or tag in Wordpress

Posted on December 13, 2008 at 5:23 am

My friend over at gHacks enlightened me to the fact that Wordpress has an interesting way of handling feeds so that you can actually subscribe not only to the main blog RSS feed, but also to individual RSS feeds for a particular category, author or tag!

I never knew this was possible and it’s something that I now find really useful! Previously, if I was interested in a particular category on a blog, I would setup a filter on my RSS reader to only see posts from my favorite category, such as Windows Downloads, etc.

So, for example, if you like my blog, but only care to read the posts I write in the Computer Tips category, then you can use the built-in features of Wordpress to subscribe to the RSS feed of just that one category.

So how do you go about doing that? It’s pretty simple actually! All you have to do is add /feed/ to the end of the URL for categories, tags, or authors. So, for example, if you want to subscribe to only the Computer Tips Category, you would use the following URL:

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/category/computer-tips/feed/

If you really like Ben’s articles on the site, you could subscribe to just his posts by using this URL:

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/author/bcarigtan/feed/

and the same goes for any tags! Overall, I am pretty surprised that I didn’t know this myself, but find it very useful considering I follow a lot of blogs, but want certain information from each one of them.

Of course, this trick may not always work, such as when the blog is not running on the Wordpress blog platform. It also may not work if the blog redirects all feeds to a feed manager like Feedburner.

If you need more advanced filtering for any reason, you can also check out my previous post on FeedHub, which allows you to create a personalized RSS feed. The cool thing about this service is that it monitors what kind of content you like and will automatically adjust your preferences over time. Enjoy!

» Filed Under Computer Tips